Quotes About Slavery

Get them off the plantation and they learned to read, it was a disease.

Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord's will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass.

it means what it say, Ethel said. It means that a Hebrew may not enslave a Hebrew. But the sons of Ham are not of that tribe. The were cursed, with black skin and tails. Where the Scripture condemns slavery, it is not speaking of negro slavery at all.

Lander's talk verged on a sermon, concerning the dilemma of finding your purpose once you've slipped the yoke of slavery. The manifold frustrations of liberty.

According to Connelly, who heard the story from the nigger trader, Michael's former master was fascinated by the abilities of South American parrots and reasoned that if a bird could be taught limericks, a slave might be taught to remember as well. Merely glancing at the size of the skulls told you that a nigger possessed a bigger brain than a bird.

Cora hoped the musicians wouldn't think them rude for their inattention. It was unlikely. Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

In effect, they abolished slavery. On the contrary, Oney Garrison said in response. We abolished niggers.

She didn't agree with the popular arguments for slavery but saw it as a necessary evil given the obvious intellectual deficiencies of the African tribe. To free them from bondage all at once would be disastrous—how would they manage their affairs without a careful and patient eye to guide them?

Antislavery literature was illegal in this part of the nation. Abolitionists and sympathizers who came down to Georgia and Florida were run off, flogged and abused by mobs, tarred and feathered. Methodists and their inanities had no place in the bosom of King Cotton. The planters did not abide contagion.

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won't survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities. She minded her place.

She thought of the picking, how it raced down the furrows at harvest, the African bodies working as one, as fast as their strength permitted. The vast fields burst with hundreds of thousands of white bolls, strung like stars in the sky on the clearest of clear nights. When the slaves finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them.

There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers.

Ajarry didn't even make it to the gunwale when she tried to jump overboard. Her simpering posture and piteous aspect, recognizable from thousands of slaves before her, betrayed her intentions. Chained head to toe, head to toe, in exponential misery.

Was there not wage slavery? Were there not the chains of financial oppression?

My dear daughter—I have for some time had hope of seeing you once more in this world, but now that hope is entirely gone forever," wrote Phebe Brownrigg to her free daughter Amy Nixon, shortly before her owner took her from North Carolina to Mississippi in 1835. One of the rare letters written by a western-bound slave on her own behalf, it concluded, "May we all meet around our Father's throne in heaven, never no more to depart.

Jinnah to Lord Mountabatten in one of his many meetings before partition: "India has never been a true nation. It only looks that way on the map. The cows I want to eat, the Hindus stops me from killing. Every time a Hindu shakes hands with me he has to wash his hands. The only thing the Muslim has in common with Hindu is his slavery to the British.

On subsequent voyages, Portuguese ships brought gold, animal hides, elephant tusks—and slaves.

By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.

In his bid to secure the loyalty of such ex-slaves, Sonthonax announced in late February that the National Convention had abolished slavery in all the French colonies.

historians have long debated which people, decisions, and actions really destroyed slavery.

Butler used slaveholders' own insistence that slaves were legal property to release slaves from owners' grasps and illustrated how war could create possibilities unavailable in peacetime. The phenomenon of the Civil War contraband camp was born.

By war's end, well over 400,000—somewhere between 12 and 15 percent of the entire U.S. slave population according to the 1860 census—had taken refuge behind Union lines, most of them in contraband camps.

Wherever slave owners tried to evacuate themselves and their slaves, the goal was to keep the workers who carried the most capital value and the Yankees away from each other.

The negro population grew by leaps and bounds, until on the eve of the Revolution it amounted to more than half a million. In five states—Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia—the slaves nearly equalled or actually exceeded the whites in number. In South Carolina they formed almost two-thirds of the population. Even in the Middle colonies of Delaware and Pennsylvania about one-fifth of the inhabitants were from Africa.