Douglass did not know much about himself. Rather vaguely, he was aware that he had been born somewhere around 1817; he had seen his mother "to know her as such" no more than four or five times in his life, usually very briefly and at night, and he grew up knowing nothing better than the life of the stalled ox or the mule, a wholly owned creature with no rights that anyone was bound to respect. More than one hundred years later, [this] account of the things men can do to those who are completely in their power is something to make the blood run cold. If there was a kindly, human side to chattel slavery, this man who lived far outside of the cotton belt, who was for long periods a trusted house servant, who was even hired out (by his owner) to work in a shipyard, far from the eye of the man with the whip--this man, who should have seen that humane side if any slave could see it, never got a glimpse of it. "But for the hope of being free," Douglass wrote, "I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself."
-- Bruce Catton American Heritage

Harvard has done us all a service in reviving [Douglass'] most important work.
-- Jim Walls San Francisco Sunday Chronicle