Quotes About Slavery

The Richmond Enquirer, the South's leading paper, called antislavery senators "a pack of curs" who "have become saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen" and thus "must be lashed into submission…. Let them understand, that for every vile word spoken against the South, they will suffer so many stripes, and they will soon learn to behave themselves like decent dogs—they never can be gentlemen.

There is not beneath the sky an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted my mother who bore me into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.

Douglass told white northern voters that 'The blood of the slave is on your garments. You have said that slavery is better than freedom. That war is better than peace. And that cruelty is better than humanity.

Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a "dinner-bell, with which in hand I passed through the principal streets," he recalled, "ringing the bell and crying out, 'Notice! Frederick Douglass, recently a slave, will lecture on American Slavery, on Grafton Common, this evening at 7 o'clock."13

Slavery does away with fathers as it does away with families," he wrote. "The order of civilization is reversed here.

immigrant poor, said Douglass, that "slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave's poverty and degradation.

My poor mother," Douglass wrote, "like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!"21

For a former slave and then an orator and an editor whose political consciousness had awakened with the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850, who had seen the fate of the slaves bandied about in one political crisis after another, and who had struggled to sustain hope in the face of the Dred Scott decision's egregious denials, a resolute stand by the North against secession and the Slave Power was hardly a sure thing.

In Lincoln's day, Riley's account also spoke to a burning issue: the troubling institution of slavery. Inverting the American paradigm, it provided a useful perspective and helped expose the brutality of that abysmal practice. In our time, when one of the great challenges we face is to find common ground for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, the plight of the crew of the Commerce achieves a new relevance. It

To end slavery, you must overcome the mental and physical inertia of the masses and quicken their intelligence and creative faculty.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

And where abolitionists preached slavery as a violation against the higher law, Southerners angrily countered with their own version of the deity, that it was sanctioned by the Constitution. In the vortex of this debate, once the battle lines were sharply drawn, moderate ground everywhere became hostage to the passions of the two sides. Reason itself had become suspect; mutual tolerance was seen as treachery. Vitriol overcame accommodation. And the slavery issue would not just fade away.

On the matter of slavery, he reproached but absolved the South of the ultimate blame: "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be judged.

Every one I talk to is in favor of putting negroes in the army and that immediately … I think slavery is now gone and what little there is left of it should be rendered as serviceable as possible." For her part, Mary Chesnut lamented, "If we had only freed the negroes at first and put them in the army—that would have trumped [the Union's] trick.

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.

The oppression and exploitation of Latinos (like Asians) have historical roots unknown to most Americans. People who learn at least a little about Black slavery remain totally ignorant about how the United States seized half of Mexico or how it has colonized Puerto Rico.

DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad. BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between. (an early comment on backlash, from Glossary for the Eighties)

Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.

the sins of slavery are given short shrift.

The slavery debate alerts us to self-justifying tendencies at work in how we use the Bible. Whenever our interpretation leads to injustice, oppression, or structural violence, then the very heart of the Bible is repudiated. Such views are anti-biblical, no matter what texts they cite.

One difference is that for the Dark, certainly, you are a pawn. For the Light, you are a free human being, free to make mistakes, to do wrong, even. You are free to choose, whether or not you believe it." "Funny idea of freedom." "It is the difference between commitment and slavery," Cadvan said. "Between working for what you hope for and believe in the depths of your heart, and what someone else forces you to do.

And so Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the new territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin so that slavery would be permanently illegal there.

Are Shareem slaves?" she asked. Slavery had been outlawed for millennia on Ariel, but she knew that some planetary systems still practiced it. "No," Talan said quickly. "Well," Rio drawled. "We can be if you want.