Quotes About Slavery

Slaves, like oxen and sheep, were known as 'live money'.

The present book draws together in one work the themes that have absorbed me all my life—the pollution of land and air and water that is inevitable in the blind obliteration of the wilderness and its wild creatures and also the injustice to the poor of our own species, especially the indigenous peoples and the inheritors of slavery left behind by the cruel hypocrisy of what those in power represent as progress and democracy. E.

As the United States lagged behind the civilized world in outlawing human slavery, so the United States now lags behind in softening the unrestrained brutalities of animal slavery.

Lady Harborough... was on the platform, making a short speech in which she described the valuable work her hospital fund was doing. It seemed to consist largely of rescuing unmarried mothers from poverty and subjecting them to slavery instead, with the additional disadvantage of being preached at daily by evangelical clergymen.

To put this immense time period in perspective, the Thirteenth Amendment—which abolished slavery—was ratified on December 6, 1865. We will have to live on this continent more than eighty additional years before the time after slavery will match in length the time during slavery. And if you include the century of Jim Crow that existed before the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in 1964, formal legal subjugation of African Americans endured for a stunning 345 years.

A universal law has often operated through much of American history. When race slavery, or other systems of racial inequality declined, racism tended to increase, and new forms of racial violence were quick to follow.

race slavery did not create the culture of the southern colonies; that culture created slavery.

Without consciousness of contradiction, southern masters cast their defense of slavery in libertarian terms, and demanded the freedom to enslave.

The concept of chattel slavery was defined very gradually in a series of statutes through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

If slavery was not quite what Virginians really wanted, it carried them closer to their conservative utopia than any alternative which lay within reach.

New generations of scholars continued to study the same subjects, but in a very different spirit. Their work tended to center less on American liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy. It gave more attention to American slavery, racism, inequality, injustice, and corruption.

One pro-slavery writer in New York spoke for many slave owners when he said that emancipation and civil rights for freed slaves would be "the total subversion of OUR liberties.

From the moment of its founding Americans began freeing their slaves—some 500,000 by the early 1800s—and in 1808 outlawed the slave trade entirely.

If the white majority is racist how can a government it dominates be counted on to redress racial grievances? The question is absurd because the premise is absurd. In fact it is America's white racial majority that ended slavery, outlawed discrimination, funded massive welfare programs for inner-city blacks, and created the very affirmative action policies that are allegedly necessary to force them to be fair.

supremacy as the foundation of all the systems in the country."10 Within days of that meeting, with great fanfare the Times introduced its 1619 Project. Times editorial board member Mara Gay explained the project's concept in simple terms: "In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.

Olmsted inquired of the man if he found it "disagreeable" to whip the slaves. "I think nothing of it," he drawled in response. "Why, sir, I wouldn't mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog."5

These human beasts of burden were recruited to work alongside oxen and donkeys, or, in the case of many captive women, to satisfy the victors' sexual urges. The origin of slavery in warfare is preserved in the etymology of the word servant, which comes from the Latin servare ("save"). Servants were "saved" for forced labor instead of being summarily executed.

There are unmistakable parallels between the treatment of slaves and the treatment of domestic animals. Brown University historian Karl Jacoby points out that that virtually all of the practices deployed for controlling livestock—practices such as "whipping, chaining, branding, castration, cropping ears"—have also been used to control slaves.

the common Greek term for "slave," andrapodon, "man-footed creature," was built on the foundation of a common term for cattle, namely, tetrapodon, "four-footed creature.

The six to eight black men were characterized as personal slaves until the mid-1950s, when the political climate changed and it was decided that instead of being slaves they were just good friends.

What Marcus Aurelius understood is that all of us are slaves in certain respects, even the emperor of Rome. We are slaves to time and chance; we are indentured to fate. "Love the hand that fate deals you and play it as your own," he wrote in his Meditations. In another gem, he observed that "it never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

We can only guess at the thrill in Douglass's heart, knowing that the cause he had so long pleaded—a sanctioned war to destroy slavery and potentially to reinvent the American republic around the principle of racial equality—might now come to fruition.

The cynic in Douglass left him saying, "Heaven help the poor slave, whose only hope for freedom is in the selfish hearts of such a people." 32

In August, Douglass righteously claimed that "everyone knows that this is the slaveholders' rebellion and nothing else." The war, he said, was the work of a "privileged class of irresponsible despots, authorized tyrants and blood-suckers, who fasten upon the Negro's flesh, and draw political power and consequence from their legalized crimes.