Quotes About Abolitionists

To-day we reverently thank the abolitionists. Earth has produced no grander men, no nobler women. They were the real philanthropists, the true patriots... heroes. He loves his country best who strives to make it best. Mere politicians wish the country to do something for them, true patriots desire to do something for their country... [P]atriotism without principle is the prejudice of birth — the animal attachment to place.

Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew what to do with its sour fruit.

Unhappy southern members and their allies in Congress proposed a "gag rule," which would prevent these petitions from being printed, read, or referred to a committee. Pierce was on the committee that drafted this proposal and denounced abolitionists on the House floor.

One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.

All the heroes of black emancipation—from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln—were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.

Even fervent abolitionists, viewing blacks as equal in rights but inferior socially and culturally, didn't relish having freedmen come north to live beside them but wanted them to stay down south.

The Boston Catholic Diary did not deny that slavery was unjust, but it declared "infinitely more reprehensible" the "zealots who would madly attempt to eradicate the evil by the destruction of our federal union." The "illustrious Liberator" could afix his signature to any document he pleased, but he had "no right to shackle the opinions of the Irishmen of America. . . . We can tell the abolitionists that we acknowledge no dictation from a foreign source. . . .