Frederick Douglass: “They had their own opinions, were independent, and called no man master.”

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

Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.

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.