Frederick Douglass: “I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them.”

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

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

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.

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.