Frederick Douglass: “Banish the idea that one class must rule over another.”

Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.

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.

That the mother was a slave was enough for its deadly purpose.

Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.