Frederick Douglass: “The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short to protect the rights of individuals in the interior…”

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.

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.

The anti-slavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed.

No word of retaliation when a black man is slain by a rebel in cold blood.