Quotes About Slavery

As a Whig, Lincoln had seen the slavery question as a threat to party unity and economic policy as a source of party strength. Now, he realized, the situation was reversed. He worked to ensure that the new party with its heterogeneous membership ignored divisive issues like the Whig economic agenda, which he had strenuously advocated for two decades but which would alienate former Democrats.

Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. "They are just what we would be in their situation

We shall lie down," Lincoln warned, "pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State." Lincoln

Our government," Lincoln declared, "rests on public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government." The task of Republicans was to counteract Democrats' "gradual and steady debauching of public opinion" until it no longer valued the central ideal of equality.52 Like the abolitionists, Lincoln saw public sentiment as the terrain on which the crusade against slavery was to be waged.

even this early in his career, Lincoln recognized slavery as the crucial question the founders had failed to resolve and the greatest threat to the survival of the republic. Condemnations

The Emancipation Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood of the documents that have shaped American history. Contrary to legend, Lincoln did not free the nearly four million slaves with a stroke of his pen. It had no bearing on slaves in the four border states, since they were not in rebellion. The Proclamation also exempted certain parts of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. All told, it left perhaps 750,000 in bondage.

For Genovese, slave owners' moral commitment to slavery was the foundation of a distinctive worldview that explained secession and the creation of the Confederacy.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?

To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery --even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness --is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.

The anti-slavery movement only took off once white people in Europe and America began to see people of African descent not as property but as people.

As one southern-born antislavery activist later wrote, it was a "sad satire to call [the] States 'United,'" because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.

Another fugitive, writing in the 1820s compared the sight of the whipped slave's black to that of 'a field lately ploughed' and proposed with scalding irony that 'if it were not for the stripes on my back' he would bequent his own skin to the government to be used as parchment wrapping for tht 'charter of American liberty' the US Constitution.

Sixty years later, a child's primer titled The Anti-slavery Alphabet made the point in rhyme: S is the sugar, that the slave Is toiling hard to make, To put into your pie and tea Your candy and your cake

Beecher described slavery as an 'organic sin,' by which he meant that a sing that permeates the body politic so completely that it cannot be cured by targeted excision but must be overwhelmed with an infusion of love.

Yet to imagine this outcome [slavery being impermissible everywhere] as somehow preordained is to be misguided by hindsight...Lincoln got it right when, shortly before his death, he called the result of the war 'astounding.

The rebellion was over, the Union restored, and after more than two centuries there was no more slavery from which to run. The vast work of repairing its human devastation had barely begun.

And yet vile as it was, the fugitive slave law was also, ironically, a gift to antislavery activists, both black and white, because wherever it was enforced, it allowed them to show off human beings dragged back to the hell whence they came—a more potent aid to the cause than any speech or pamphlet.

The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union, or (for Northerners) how to destroy slavery while preserving the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

Nothing during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery.

Influenced by Wesley and the revival movement, Englishman William Wilberforce led the successful movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.

Another volunteer Negro soldier named Scott Thomas reported that he had been owned by John Rice, probably also a son of Dangerfield Rice, brother of James Porter Rice, and uncle of my great-grandfather Will Rice.

Slavery proved to be a much more complicated issue for American evangelicals both North and South, who discovered that their religious attitudes and interpretations were colored by their economic interests. This pattern was played out in the history of the Rice family, whose evangelical theology underwent a transformation as they moved within two generations from being small yeoman farmers to landed proprietors whose wealth depended upon the system of chattel slavery.