Quotes About Slavery

In Norfolk, Virginia, four thousand slaves—who, living in a border state that was not part of the Confederacy, were not actually freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—

Many wars had to do with religion, and because many slaves were prisoners of war, slaves and their owners tended to be people of different faiths: Christians enslaved Jews; Muslims enslaved

Upshur believed that slavery solved the problem of the tensions between capital and labor by giving even a white man of desperate circumstances a reason to accept the economic order: "However poor, or ignorant or miserable he may be, he has yet the consoling consciousness that there is a still lower condition to which he can never be reduced."5 Tyler

On July 11, Wilson asked why, if slaves were admitted as people, they weren't "admitted as Citizens." And "then why are they not admitted on an equality with White Citizens?" And, if they weren't admitted as people, "Are they admitted as property? Then why is not other property admitted into the computation?

Nowhere do the words "slave" or "slavery" appear in the final document. "What will be said of this new principle of founding a right to govern Freemen on a power derived from slaves," Pennsylvania's John Dickinson wondered—correctly, as it would turn out. He predicted: "The omitting the Word will be regarded as an Endeavour to conceal a principle of which we are ashamed."49

Those who are by nature possessions are those who have a lesser capacity for reason; these people "are by nature slaves," Aristotle wrote, "and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master."40

Involuntary servitude was banned by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, but nothing was done to confront the ideology of white supremacy. Slavery didn't end in 1865; it just evolved.

To my way of thinking, the slavery issue is just an excuse to allow some people to do hateful things and feel righteous about it.

Ironically, a Slave Power–less Congress confirmed a long-held truism about the code of honor: it did indeed force men to watch their words.

As tempting as it is to dismiss American slavery in the pre–Civil War decades as an antiquated holdover doomed to extinction, in the early decades of the nineteenth century it was flourishing.7

Pledged to fight the Slave Power, Republican congressmen stayed true to that pledge. Face-to-face with slaveholders, they propounded their cause with strong words, bold actions, and—when pushed to extremes—the force of their fists, knives, and guns, and were applauded by Northerners for doing so. Like French, they were prepared to fight for Northern rights if necessary—even to the point of disunion

Black culture and history as something worthy of study, and to replace the "n-word" with "Brother" and "Sister." You see, the "n-word" was not some reclamation of Black community; it was part of a process of dehumanization required by chattel slavery. We weren't human beings; we were n*****. I have not used the word since walking into M. Navies' class. I was 13 years old." - Melina Abdullah

The khñum debt slavery scenario sounds brutal until you consider that most capitalist cultures in the West use a similar system. In the United States, it's not unusual for people to graduate from college with so much debt that they have to work their whole lives to pay it off.

Among the short-lived races, pleasure slaves became emotionally unstable after a few years. It took decades among the long-lived races, but eventually the combination of aphrodisiacs and constant arousal without being allowed any release twisted something inside the males. After that, with careful handling, they still had their uses, but not as pleasure slaves. Daemon had been a pleasure slave for most of his life.

American slavery at its beginnings—obscure, distant, and tragic—is probably for most people a less attractive point of focus than the story of the discovery and political founding of the American nation. If you like your history heroic—and many people seem to—the story of slavery in the early American period is simply not the place to go looking for heroes, at least not among the people most commonly written about. Second

American slavery at its beginnings—obscure, distant, and tragic—is probably for most people a less attractive point of focus than the story of the discovery and political founding of the American nation. If you like your history heroic—and many people seem to—the story of slavery in the early American period is simply not the place to go looking for heroes, at least not among the

Because slavery in the United States was racially based, it was easy to graft the legally imposed incapacities of slavery onto Black people as a group, making incapacity an inherent feature of the race.

We would consider the nearly twelve-year-old a child. By the standards of Elizabeth's day, twelve marked the beginning of the end of childhood for most females, but particularly for female slaves whose status as property made the designation "child" short-lived.

Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.

Neither can men, by the same principles, be considered as lands, goods, or houses, among possessions. It is necessary that all property should be inferiour to its possessor. But how does the slave differ from his master, but by chance?

If a man carries his horse out of a slave State into a free one, be does not lose his property interest in him; but if he carries his slave into a free State, the law makes him free.

One of the first things the PT government did when it took office in 2003, after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the presidency, was to create a 'dirty list' of hundreds of companies and individual employers who were investigated by labor prosecutors and found to be using slaves.

I call for a march from exploitation to education, from poverty to shared prosperity, a march from slavery to liberty, and a march from violence to peace.

God knows I detest slavery but it is an existing evil, and we must endure it and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution.