Frederick Douglass: “Could they know slavery as I knew it, they would hasten to the work of its extinction.”

No word of retaliation when a black man is slain by a rebel in cold blood.

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

I wished it was possible I could remain small all my life, knowing that the sooner I grew large the shorter would be my time to remain with them.

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.