Quotes About Slavery

That such views were commonly held before Volney's time surprises many–and is a measure of slavery's comprehensive psychic and social costs, to those who bore them directly and to us their damaged descendants who bear them still today.

One hundred fifty years before, one hundred fifty miles to the west, slaves in Haiti had won their freedom by defeating the sixty-thousand-man army of Napoleon Bonaparte. This, never told to class.

Perhaps they had been slaves to the emperor for so long that they no longer had a spark of freedom that could be ignited. Augustus Caesar and his successors had cleverly wooed them, turning defiant citizens into submissive slaves, all in exchange for Roman peace, beautiful roads, free food, and entertainment.

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

my reggae teaches the history of our people. it speaks about slavery then and now. how many americans know about the-1811 slave revolt? slavery built america. when I speak of reparation for slaves as black people this is something that should never be denied. why are the current politicians having a problem with reparation? why is there no slave monument in america? my reggae asks the questions!!

According to Wood's critics, however, this "idea of equality" left many in the lurch: women who could not vote, almost half a million slaves, somewhere between 110,000 and 150,000 Native Americans, about 80,000 to 100,000 loyalists who had to leave their homes (as well as hundreds of thousands of others who remained where they were but faced repercussions for their prior allegiances), and even many patriots who remained without property at war's end.

When slave owners claimed they could not join the minutemen because they had to stay home to prevent insurrections, small farmers objected that service in the military was "calculated to exempt the gentlemen and throw the whole burthern on the poor" and that "the Rich wanted the Poor to fight for them, to defend there property, whilst they refused to fight for themselves."32

On October 8 Washington convened a war council to determine "whether it will be adviseable to re-inlist any Negroes in the new Army—or whether there be a Distinction between such as are Slaves & those who are free?" The Council voted "unanimously to reject all Slaves, & by a great Majority to reject Negroes altogether.

Since free people of color, almost invariably poor, came cheaply, prior restrictions against their enlistment were either overturned or ignored. Despite national policy, even slaves were allowed to enlist; some towns paid bounties to masters who allowed their slaves to join the army.

White resistance to putting African Americans under arms was strongest in areas with the greatest concentrations of slaves. But even in Virginia, the heart of tobacco land, patriots could not ignore the possibilities for exploiting black manpower. More than half the free Negro males of military age in Virginia joined the army, probably for the same reason that freemen from the North enlisted: it was the best or only job available.

The fear of slaves on the one hand, and the military potential of mobilizing slaves on the other, gave a peculiar twist to the logic of war in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland.

For enslaved people themselves—about 430,000 in the southern colonies, and another 50,000 or so in the North—the coming of the Revolution brought new hopes and new dangers.9 They could not have helped but notice the peculiar references to "freedom" and "slavery" voiced by their masters.

in 1772 Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, determined that James Sommersett, who had been purchased in Virginia, taken to England, and then escaped, could not be forcibly returned to his master.10 American slaves took this case to heart: if they could somehow reach the shores of England, they too would be set free.

They feared slaves who "entertained ideas, that the present contest was for obliging us to give them their liberty."12 They feared the British, who "have been tampering with our Negroes; and have held nightly meetings with them; and all for the glorious purpose of enticing them to cut their masters' throats while they are asleep.

Yet patriot masters apparently felt the need to fabricate such arguments, if only to relieve their own consciences. Understandably, they preferred to envision themselves as purveyors of freedom, the British as engineers of slavery. But it wasn't true, and the slaves undoubtedly knew this.

Liberty to slaves"—it must have sounded so sweet. On plantations throughout the Chesapeake region African Americans held in bondage spread the news.

Despite these gross exaggerations, even the most conservative estimates by modern scholars suggest that well over 10,000 slaves fled to the British in search of freedom, while the total number of blacks who served in the Continental Army was only about 5,000—and many of these, perhaps most, were freeman, not slaves.

In the words of historian Robert Olwell, "fugitive slaves were sheltered under the guise that they constituted contraband enemy property, rather than recognized as liberated persons."90 Royal officers wanted slaves for the labor they might perform—and to deprive the rebels of that labor.

Slaves who had escaped from loyalist masters were returned upon demand. Other refugees who were not deemed of use by the army were put to work on plantations owned by British officers or sold to the West Indies. If short of supplies, the British would sometimes trade back slaves for provisions. When the royal fleet retreated from Port Royal in 1780, Major General Alexander Leslie refused to take with him several hundred African Americans who had dared to escape and were requesting asylum

As governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson signed a bill granting every white male who enlisted for the duration of the war "300 acres of land plus a healthy sound Negro between 20 and 30 years of age or 60 pounds in gold

Literally and figuratively, this was the fate of many southern slaves in the Revolutionary War. They had scented freedom—some had even managed a taste—but here they were on a desolate plain, starving and diseased, cast out and abandoned between two sets of white men who had once used them to great advantage.

Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery.

The question of what actually caused the Civil War is secondary to the result of the Civil War, which is that after the war was over, slavery was ended, and the North and the South reconciled. And I think we need to respect that.

All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations. Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me - I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.