Frederick Douglass: “In ceasing to instruct me, she must begin to justify herself to herself; and, once consenting to take sides in such a…”

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

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

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.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.