Quotes from James Oakes

Societies that robbed humans of what they had rightfully earned by the sweat of their brows paid a steep price for this theft. They destroyed the individual's incentive to work, undermined the general prosperity, and thereby doomed themselves to poverty and famine.

For Lincoln state constitutions were the key to abolition.

A Florida planter defended his management practices by pointing to his slaves' "natural increase which in the last year has been over ten percent, in a gang of 120." A Georgia overseer informed his employer that with good management his plantation could produce much more cotton.

In some of the most heavily populated slave states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia—between thirty-five and fifty percent of the white families held slaves in 1860.

no master could be isolated from the dehumanizing effects of the rigorous discipline of the slave regime or from the disruptive intrusions of the market economy upon which that regime thrived. These central features of slavery, punishment and profit, destroyed for most slaveholders whatever remained of the elemental principle of the paternalist ethos: that masters were obliged to look to the needs of the slaves in return for the diligence and fidelity of the bondsmen.

1856 a Virginia master offered "a reward of six cents for the apprehension of his boy 'Sam,' who absconded some time in the month of March.… He has a down look, and, on his back, wears the stripes of a recent whipping. One tooth is knocked out, and I believe he has a scar under the left

The reformer," Douglass explained in 1883, had "a difficult and disagreeable task before him. He has to part with old friends; break away from the beaten paths of society, and advance against the vehement protests of the most sacred sentiments of the human heart.