Quotes About Antislavery

Cassius Marcellus Clay of Lexington, Kentucky, founder of the antislavery newspaper The True American, commanded a crowd of about fifteen hundred in a grove in Springfield. Lincoln, accompanied by his friend Orville Browning, was there. "Whittling sticks, as he lay on the turf, Lincoln gave me a most patient hearing," Clay recalled. "I shall never forget his long, ungainly form, and his ever sad and homely face.

Antislavery, rather than slavery, was the world-historical innovation of the era.

One of the petitioners, an infamous do-gooder of uncertain sanity named Warner Mifflin, had actually acknowledged that his antislavery vision came to him after he was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm.

He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension

The Richmond Enquirer, the South's leading paper, called antislavery senators "a pack of curs" who "have become saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen" and thus "must be lashed into submission…. Let them understand, that for every vile word spoken against the South, they will suffer so many stripes, and they will soon learn to behave themselves like decent dogs—they never can be gentlemen.

He had a wide-ranging knowledge of antislavery activism. He shared the loathing of slavery that was the common denominator among all its varieties, including Garrisonian radicalism, the evangelicalism of the Beechers and Finneys, Transcendentalist individualism, and the political approach of the Liberty and Free Soil Parties. Of the varieties, he strongly preferred the latter

Doak and other early abolitionists planted a host of Presbyterian churches and "log cabin colleges" that taught a strong antislavery doctrine. They laid the basis for eastern Tennessee to become the first true locus of the abolition movement in America.

As early as 1775, Philadelphia Quakers had launched the world's first antislavery society, followed by others in the north and south.

Charleston's postmaster had asked New York City's postmaster, Samuel Gouveneur, to extract antislavery tracts from his southbound mail. Gouveneur agreed and informed the postmaster general that he planned to deny postal access to Tappan and his colleagues. The issue went up to Andrew Jackson, who informally authorized Gouveneur's embargo on "offensive papers" and explicitly denounced the AASS in his Annual Message. For the moment, the abolitionists were stymied.

When we say the Black church, we have never meant anything racially exclusive by that. The Black church is the antislavery church. It is an independent Christian witness that literally emerged fighting for freedom and insisting that the gospel is about equality, justice and inclusive humanity.

Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.

The history of the early abolitionist movement," writes historian Arthur Zilversmit, "is essentially the record of Quaker antislavery activities.

While calling at American ports was dangerous, their wharves trawled by bounty hunters, whalers were bound for the Indian and Pacific Oceans, where there were no slave masters' agents, and where desertion to the wider world was an option. So men like Johnson encouraged fugitive slaves to seek berths on the whalers of Fairhaven and New Bedford and were actively assisted by the antislavery Quaker shipowners, who had quickly established a tradition of employing black runaways as crew.

Thus Lincoln believed he would best hold the border states, and thus serve the antislavery cause itself, by pretending that this was not a war fought over slavery. Yet of course Lincoln could have avoided the war and saved the union had he embraced the Crittenden proposal or simply adopted Douglas' doctrine of popular sovereignty. The fact that he refused to do so proves that Lincoln was willing to go to war to prevent slavery from spreading into the territories.