Frederick Douglass: “There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it.”

I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.

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.

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

It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.