The adoption of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments and their incorporation into the Constitution of the United States opened a very tempting field to my ambition, and one to which I should probably have yielded, had I been a younger man.
In his autobiography, Douglass reflects on the opportunities for political office that arose for Black men after the Reconstruction amendments.
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His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.
True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.
Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.