I looked at him with some astonishment, that he could rest upon a reed so weak and broken, and told him that Virginia would blow him and his hostages sky-high, rather than that he should hold Harper’s Ferry an hour.
Recalling his meeting with John Brown before the Harper's Ferry raid, Douglass expresses his skepticism about the plan's viability.
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The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.
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.
He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.