Frederick Douglass: “Henry loved liberty for himself, but this man loved liberty for all men, and for those most despised and scorned, as…”

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.

My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.

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.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.