Frederick Douglass: “A sense of my loneliness and helplessness crept over me, and covered me with something bordering on despair.”

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.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

A son of toil himself, he was linked in brotherly sympathy with the sons of toil in every loyal part of the republic.

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.