Quotes About Slavery

Charles Spurgeon was a fierce opponent of social injustice, especially slavery, and joined other evangelicals in crusades to eliminate poverty, hunger, and homelessness, especially for children.

As the Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and others—were carried into the slave states of the South, into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, their churches, pastors, and congregants were dipped in the culture and economy of the South, and increasingly found it necessary to defend and justify the practice of human bondage.

Fellow Englishman Charles Spurgeon was a fierce opponent of social injustice, especially slavery, and joined other evangelicals in crusades to eliminate poverty, hunger, and homelessness, especially for children.

Over the forty-two years that the Rice family lived in Missouri during the 19th century, the family evolved from poor dirt farmers to be the owners of many slaves and several contiguous plantations laid out on broad flat plains and green fields south of the wide river. They could leverage vast wealth embodied in human beings whom they owned as one might own a horse or a hat.

The new evangelical movement in the early 19th century was strongly focused on social justice and social equality. The famous English preacher Charles Spurgeon saw some of his sermons burned in America due to his censure of slavery before the Civil War, calling it "a soul-destroying sin," "the foulest blot" which "may have to be washed out in blood.

The first Baptist missionaries had reached Texas in 1812 in company with the first white American settlers who crossed the Red River. By 1848, there still were only 950 Baptists in the state, 250 of them black slaves. Baptists were a somewhat radical sect in those days. They believed that blacks and whites were all the children of God, equal in the sight and judgment of God, and equally deserving of salvation, so Baptist missionaries were sent out to both the slaves and to the whites.

Before Will was two years old, Abraham Lincoln was elected president and the slave states of the South seceded from the Union, launching the Civil War. The war would be murderous and merciless beyond the capacity of any American to imagine in 1861, and both sides used their religion and their notion of God and his justice to define and defend their parts in the mayhem.

The Rice family owned more slaves than most other families in the vicinity of Warrensburg, and on August 13, 1862, the family fortunes suffered a severe blow.

In the first years after the Revolutionary War, Baptist evangelicals in the South as well as throughout the country were deeply opposed to slavery. They believed that all were equal in the sight of God, criticized the categories of race and class, and embraced the cause of freedom for African Americans.

The Baptist teaching that all are equal in the sight of God seemed to run right up against the notion that any human being had a right to own another.

For his entire adulthood and throughout his public ministry in Texas, John R. Rice had avoided talking about the subject of race. He had never, by any published report or in the memory of any of his friends or family members or in any sermon in The Sword of the Lord, attacked or defended the institution of slavery or the subjugation of black people by white people.

Slavery in law had been abolished, but slavery in fact continued until after World War II, and was accomplished and supported through violence, brutality, imprisonment, torture, denial of civil and human rights, and enforced poverty.

The keystone of slavery in its new guise was the system of convict labor, which entrapped hundreds of thousands of black men in a permanent state of terror and involuntary servitude, and which kept the entire black community in a state of quiet, fearful resignation.

Especially in Appalachian east Tennessee, where there were few slaves and few slave owners, the evangelical revivals of the Awakening movement cradled the abolition movement.

A principal leader of the revival movement in east Tennessee was Samuel Doak, the Presbyterian minister who had delivered his famous "Sword of the Lord" sermon in 1780 sending the Tennessee militia off to defeat the British. As the fires of revival flared up in the 1800s, Doak converted to abolitionism, freed all his slaves, and then traveled the countryside preaching that any true Christian would condemn and work to end the institution of slavery.

The logic of evangelical Protestants in the 18th century led to an inescapable conclusion: If God was indeed no respecter of persons, and if all were equal in the sight of God—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, white and colored—then Christians had no business owning slaves or benefitting from their labor and suffering, and slavery itself was a crime against God.

An escaped slave named Jerry Rice from the vicinity of the Rice plantations, whose owner was named William Rice—quite probably the brother of James Porter Rice—was listed as a volunteer for the United States Colored Troops for Missouri.

It was the work of all true Christians, Wesley urged, to act as instruments of God for the suppression of slavery.

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.

In 2009, at the Vancouver Peace Summit, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern-day slavery; weeks later, I flew down to Los Angeles and met with the director of Free the Slaves; thus began my journey into exploring modern-day slavery.

Slavery didn't break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.

Not to discontinue our allegiance, in this case, would be to join with the sovereign in promoting the slavery and misery of that society, the welfare of which, we ourselves, as well as our sovereign, are indispensably obliged to secure and promote, as far as in us lies.

Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery - did not abolish slavery for those convicted of a crime.

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.