Frederick Douglass: “The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.”

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

My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.

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.

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.