Frederick Douglass: “Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his…”

The anti-slavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed.

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.

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.