We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. – Epictetus, Roman philosopher and former slave, Discourses
Frederick Bailey was a slave. As a boy in Maryland in the 1820s, he had no mother or father to look after him. ('It is a common custom,' he later wrote, 'to part children from their mothers . . . before the child has reached its twelfth month.') He was one of countless millions of slave children whose realistic prospects for a hopeful life were nil.