Frederick Douglass: “Such an augmentation of wealth, power, and population has no example in the experience of any nation in ancient or…”

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.

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

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.