Quotes About Slavery

Cuba must be ours," declared Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. He also wanted the Yucatán peninsula, so that the Gulf of Mexico would become "a basin of water belonging to the United States." His fellow Mississippian, Senator Albert Brown, coveted Central America. "I want these countries for the spread of slavery," he said. "I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.

they could not see how the North could be so foolish as to determinedly prevent the extension of Slavery." Doing so would harm industry and commerce—which was all they thought truly mattered in the North. "This was the end of their track.

Uncompensated emancipation suggests not that the Founders' Constitution is being changed but that it is being repudiated—claims based on slavery are as invalid as claims based on rebel debt. Uncompensated emancipation is of course also a feature of the Emancipation Proclamation—and the Takings Clause issue is one of several reasons to think that the Emancipation Proclamation is unconstitutional under the Founders' Constitution.

The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn't have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river.

consumers do look for bargains, and they don't usually stop to ask why a product is so cheap. We have to face facts: by always looking for the best deal, we may be choosing slave-made goods without knowing what we are buying.

When the police become criminals, slavery can take root.

Looking at the nature of new slavery we see obvious themes: slaves are cheap and disposable; control continues without legal ownership; slavery is hidden behind contracts; and slavery flourishes in communities under stress. Those social conditions have to exist side by side with an economy that fosters slavery.

Slaves today are cheaper than they have ever been. The cost of slaves has fallen to a historical low, as little as $10.

Slavery is theft -- theft of a life, theft of work, theft of any property or produce, theft even of the children a slave might have borne.

Slavery is about money. People are enslaved to make a profit. Most slaveholders have little interest in hurting anyone, in being cruel or torturing someone; it is simply part of the job.

There will never be slaves in Britain,' Godalming continued, 'but those who stay warm will naturally serve us, as the excellent Bessie has just served me. Have a care, lest you wind up the equivalent of some damned regimental water-bearer.' In India, I knew a water-bearer who was a better man than most.

This lack of liberty, or rather this slavery to fashion, is one of the idols which attracts a great number of Christians. How much money is sacrificed upon its altar!—without taking into account that so much good could otherwise be done with it. Being poor in spirit means, above all, being unrestrained by what is called fashion; it means freedom.

For Johnson, nearly 250 years of unpaid toil to build one of the wealthiest nations on earth did not earn citizenship.

Plantation owners were thus notorious for "barbarities such as scalding, burning, castrating, and extracting the tongues or eyes of slaves." 23 That combination of the insatiable desire for enormous profits coupled with the sadistic brutalization of bonded African labor created an overwhelming fear among whites of the enslaved's capacity and desire for retribution. And they needed to be fearful.

It denied the enslaved the right to bear arms; ignored the right to self-defense for Black people; and put in place a "large-scale military machinery," the militia, "to crack down [on] any conspiracies or uprisings." 15 As early as 1639, Virginia prohibited Africans from carrying guns because "what white Southerners feared the most … [was] an armed black man unafraid to retaliate against both the system of slavery and those who fought to defend it.

In 1680, as racialized chattel slavery congealed, the legislature crafted a law denying the enslaved and free Blacks the right to self-defense if attacked by their " 'master' and/ or Whites." 18 Next, in 1723, the colony's statute explicitly stated that "no negro, mulatto, or indian [sic] whatsoever" should have a gun "under penalty of a whipping not to exceed twenty-nine lashes.

Whether they trusted them or not, the plantation owners voiced concerns that if they didn't use "great caution … our slaves when armed might become our masters." 31 South Carolina then formally merged the separate slave patrol with the militia to strengthen the colony's internal and external defenses.

Millions of enslaved people and their ancestors had built the enormous wealth of the United States; indeed, in 1860, 80 percent of the nation's gross national product was tied to slavery.19 Yet, in return for nearly 250 years of toil, African Americans had received nothing but rape, whippings, murder, the dismemberment of families, and forced subjugation, illiteracy, and abject poverty. The quest to break the chains was clear.

Similarly, Carl Schurz reported that in his conversation with a plantation owner, who was beside himself that emancipation had left him without any slaves to do the heavy lifting, the man dismissed the idea of working the land himself. "The idea that he would work with his hands as a farmer seemed to strike him as ludicrously absurd. He told me with a smile that he had never done a day's work of that kind in his life.

It doesn't bother you that your canine brethren are being paraded around show rings like slaves?" "My canine brethren?" I said. "I don'thave any canine brethren." "How can you say that! You're a werewolf." "That's right. I'm a werewolf, not a poodle. What makes you think I have any kinship with dogs?

If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.

One of the strong arguments for slavery was that it brought the Negro into the light of salvation. And yet the Negro today is all but lost.

The invention of reliable and recognizable timepieces—clocks and bell towers—liberated workers from the bondage of piecework, which entails regimentation to count the pieces and favors quantity over quality, slavery over free labor.

Money, like the cosmos, has become relativistic and reversible at will. The three hundred years of Newtonian prosperity having come to an end, the new multiverse seems unable to repeat the miracle of a golden age of capitalism. It is now widely held that citizens are essentially owned by the state on which they depend. Slavery, in the form of servitude to governments, is making a comeback as money transactions become less trustworthy.