Frederick Douglass: “Men hold up their hands to Heaven, and swear they will do justice, but what are oaths against prejudice and against…”

We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.

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

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.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.