Frederick Douglass: “My second ground for doubt and denial is based upon what I know of the character and antecedents of the men and women…”

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.

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

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.