Frederick Douglass: “It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.”

The day we celebrate is preëminently the colored man’s day.

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

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.