Frederick Douglass: “The slaveholder, as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system.”

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

I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.

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.

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.