Frederick Douglass: “The laws of its life are spiritual, not carnal, and it must conform to these laws or it starves and dies.”

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.

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.

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.