Quotes About Slavery

Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree? Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.

Unlike Europeans who immigrated to this land to escape from tyranny, Africans came in chains to serve a nation of tyrants.

The upper South, like the lower, went to war to defend the freedom of white men to own slaves and to take them into the territories as they saw fit, lest these white men be enslaved by Black Republicans who threatened to deprive them of these liberties.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

A Florida planter defended his management practices by pointing to his slaves' "natural increase which in the last year has been over ten percent, in a gang of 120." A Georgia overseer informed his employer that with good management his plantation could produce much more cotton.

In some of the most heavily populated slave states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia—between thirty-five and fifty percent of the white families held slaves in 1860.

no master could be isolated from the dehumanizing effects of the rigorous discipline of the slave regime or from the disruptive intrusions of the market economy upon which that regime thrived. These central features of slavery, punishment and profit, destroyed for most slaveholders whatever remained of the elemental principle of the paternalist ethos: that masters were obliged to look to the needs of the slaves in return for the diligence and fidelity of the bondsmen.

1856 a Virginia master offered "a reward of six cents for the apprehension of his boy 'Sam,' who absconded some time in the month of March.… He has a down look, and, on his back, wears the stripes of a recent whipping. One tooth is knocked out, and I believe he has a scar under the left

It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impossible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be paid for with terrible suffering or death.

There is something about the call to sacrificial love that finally removes any claim to superiority, any claim to priority in decision-making, any claim to special honor. The same vision finally led, in the nineteenth century, not only to the "humanization" of the slave trade but to the recognition that slavery itself was fundamentally incompatible with the worship of a God who "shows no partiality.

But the church's struggle with slavery does illustrate forcefully how assumed understandings of Scripture, based on simple readings of the texts, have been overturned through a deeper engagement with the truth of God's Word, enlivened by the witness of human experience.

Such scathing criticisms moved Southern leaders to equally fierce defenses. They proclaimed slavery a "positive good" rather than a mere necessity, of immense benefit to whites and blacks alike.

if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong

Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right. The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive . . . these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men.

He then took his listeners back to their common beginnings, to the founding of the nation, unraveling a narrative to demonstrate that when the Constitution was adopted, "the plain, unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity

Find time and space in which to think. As Lincoln began to survey the darkening landscape of the war and consider a new strategy regarding slavery, he needed time to reflect upon both the constitutionality and the ramifications of issuing an emancipation order.

Lincoln always believed, he later said, that "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and he could not remember when he did not "so think, and feel.

As a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this object, [preservation of the Union] I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare that on the first day of January in the year of our Lord 1863 all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained shall then, thenceforward and forever, be free.

Mammy was both the perfect mother and the perfect slave: whites saw her as a "passive nurturer, a mother figure who gave all without expectation of return, who not only acknowledged her inferiority to whites but who loved them."23 It is important to recognize, however, that Mammy did not reflect any virtue in Black motherhood.

The law made slave women's children the property of the slaveowner. White masters therefore could increase their wealth by

As we will see below, when a female slave's role as worker conflicted with that of childbearer, concern for high productivity often outweighed concern for high fertility.

Slaveholders were willing to overwork pregnant slaves at the expense of the health of both mother and child.

Some slaveowners also practiced slave-breeding by compelling slaves they considered "prime stock" to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale.

The American legal system is rooted in this monstrous combination of racial and gender domination. One of America's first laws concerned the status of children born to slave mothers and fathered by white men: a 1662 Virginia statute made these children slaves.3