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Slavery

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There are and always will be some who, ashamed of the behavior of their ancestors, try to prove that slavery wasn't so bad after all, that its evils and its cruelty were the exaggerations of propagandists and not the habitual lot of the slaves. Men will say (and accept) anything in order to foster national pride or soothe a troubled conscience. ~ C. L. R. James

Slavery is a form of forced labor in which human beings are forcibly held under the involuntary control of others, and required to work under legal penalty.

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A

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Consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust, as offensive in the sight of God as it is derogatory from our own honor or interest or happiness. ~ John Adams
Slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude and I am utterly averse to the admission of slavery. ~ John Adams
The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave. ~ Augustine of Hippo
  • If my present theme were the institution of slavery in general, I should endeavour to show that it has been a mighty instrument not for evil only, but for good in the providential order of the world. Almighty God, in His mysterious ways, has poured down blessings even through servitude itself, by awakening the spirit of sacrifice on the one hand, and the spirit of charity on the other.
    • Lord Acton, Historical Studies and Essays (1907), pp. 135–36
  • Let us see delineated before us the true map of man. Let us hear the dignity of his nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God—that consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust, as offensive in the sight of God as it is derogatory from our own honor or interest or happiness.
  • I Shall not pause to consider whether my Opinion will be popular or unpopular with the Slave Holders, or Slave Traders, in the Northern the Middle, the Southern, or the Western, States—I respect all those who are necessarily subjected to this Evil.—But Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal Magnitude. … I am therefore utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territory, and heartily wish that every Constitutional measure may be adopted for the preservation of it.
  • The first steps of the slaveholder to justify by argument the peculiar institutions is to deny the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. He denies that all men are created equal. He denies that he has inalienable rights.
  • I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty, than America did for the negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln. I am at a loss to understand how you Americans could have been so blind as to leave the negro slave without tools to work out his salvation. In giving him personal liberty, you have him an obligation to perform to the state which he must be unable to fulfill. Without property of any kind he cannot educate himself and his children. I believe the time must come when many will question the manner of American emancipation of the negro slaves in 1863. The vote, in the hands of an ignorant man, without either property or self respect, will be used to the damage of the people at large; for the rich man, without honor or any kind of patriotism, will purchase it, and with it swamp the rights of a free people.
    • Alexander II, emperor of Russia, conversation with Wharton Barker, Pavlovski Palace (August 17, 1879); reported in Barker, "The Secret of Russia's Friendship", The Independent (March 24, 1904), p. 647
  • You arrive in America, land of opportunity, milk and honey, and guess what? You all get to be slaves! Split up, sold off and worked to death! The lucky ones get Sunday off to sleep and fuck and make more slaves, and all for what? For cotton? Indigo? For a fucking purple shirt? The only good news is the tobacco your grandkids are gonna farm for free is gonna give a shitload of these white motherfuckers cancer. And I ain't even started yet. A hundred years later, you're fucked! A hundred years after that, fucked! A hundred years after you get free, you still getting fucked outta jobs and shot at by police!
  • Slavery does not merely mean a legalized form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found where, as in the Caste System, some persons are compelled to carry on certain prescribed callings which are not of their choice.
  • Everybody infers that Islam must be free from slavery and caste. Regarding slavery nothing needs to be said. It stands abolished now by law. But while it existed much of its support was derived from Islam and Islamic countries.
    • B. R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946) (p. 228-230)
  • Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century. Instead, it changed its forms and continues to harm people in every country in the world. Whether they are women forced into prostitution, men forced to work in agriculture or construction, children in sweatshops or girls forced to marry older men, their lives are controlled by their exploiters, they no longer have a free choice and they have to do as they’re told. They are in slavery. Today slavery is less about people literally owning other people – although that still exists – but more about being exploited and completely controlled by someone else, without being able to leave. [...] Many people think that slavery happens only overseas, in developing countries. In fact, no country is free from modern slavery, even Britain. The Government estimates that there are tens of thousands people in modern slavery in the UK.
  • The dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness; while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices; of which vices when the divine Scripture treats, it says, “For of whom any man is overcome, to the same he is also the bond-slave.”
    • Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (early 400s), IV, 3
    • Variant translation: The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices.

Melinda A. Anderson, “What Kids Are Really Learning About Slavery”, The Atlantic, (Feb 1, 2018)

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  • A class of middle-schoolers in Charlotte, North Carolina, was asked to cite “four reasons why Africans made good slaves.” Nine third-grade teachers in suburban Atlanta assigned math word problems about slavery and beatings. A high school in the Los Angeles-area reenacted a slave ship—with students’ lying on the dark classroom floor, wrists taped, as staff play the role of slave ship captains. And for a lesson on Colonial America, fifth-graders at a school in northern New Jersey had to create posters advertising slave auctions.
    School assignments on slavery routinely draw national headlines and scorn. Yet beyond the outraged parents and school-district apologies lies a complex and entrenched set of education challenges. A new report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project points to the widespread failure to accurately teach the hard, and nuanced, history of American slavery and enslaved people. Collectively, the report finds that slavery is mistaught, mischaracterized, sanitized, and sentimentalized—leaving students poorly educated, and contemporary issues of race and racism misunderstood.
  • Among 12th-graders, only 8 percent could identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War. Fewer than one-third (32 percent) correctly named the 13th Amendment as the formal end of U.S. slavery, with a slightly higher share (35 percent) choosing the Emancipation Proclamation. And fewer than half (46 percent) identified the “Middle Passage” as the transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to North America.
    Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, said the research, conducted in 2017, revealed the urgent need for schools to do a better job of teaching slavery. “Students are being deprived of the truth about our history [and] the materials that teachers have are not particularly good,” she said. “I would hope that students would look at this and realize that they deserve to know better … and teachers need to know there are better ways to teach this [topic].”
    The student results, which the report labels “dismal,” extend beyond factual errors to a failure to grasp key concepts underpinning the nature and legacy of slavery. Fewer than one-quarter (22 percent) of participating high-school seniors knew that “protections for slavery were embedded in [America’s] founding documents”—that rather than a “peculiar institution” of the South, slavery was a Constitutionally enshrined right. And fewer than four in 10 students surveyed (39 percent) understood how slavery “shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness.”
    Examining the teachers’ survey results might help explain why students struggled to answer questions on American enslavement: Educators are struggling themselves. While teachers overwhelmingly (92 percent) claim they are “comfortable discussing slavery” in their classroom, their teaching practices reveal profound lapses. Only slightly more than half (52 percent) teach their students about slavery’s legal roots in the nation’s founding documents, while just 53 percent emphasize the extent of slavery outside of the antebellum South. And 54 percent teach the continuing legacy of slavery in today’s society.
    Additionally, dozens of teachers rely on “simulations”—role-playing and games—to teach slavery, a method that Teaching Tolerance has warned against on the grounds that it can lead to stereotypes and oversimplification.
  • “Can you teach slavery without it being psychologically violent to the children? The answer is no, violence will occur and is expected,” he said. “The key is the recognition of white supremacy and [of] the humanity of black people that helps aid in the complexity of the subject.”
  • “It’s clear that the United States is still struggling with how to talk about the history of slavery and its aftermath,” the report concludes. “The front lines of this struggle are in schools, as teachers do the hard work of explaining this country’s history and helping students to understand how the present relates to the past.”

B

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  • A slave owner is not a man but a master. By denying the humanity of his slaves he also abrogates his own humanity.
  • It may be that local custom and culture support slavery and that most of the population knows of its existence, but admitting it is something else again. Here false contracts conceal slavery. Slaveholders can easily force their slaves to sign anything: mortgages, loan agreements, indentures, or labor contracts. If questions are raised, signed contracts are produced and corrupt law enforcement looks the other way. Even in countries with mostly honest and conscientious police, the contracts hide slavery.
    • Kevin Bales, in Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999), p. 27
  • Notwithstanding the interruptions of war, the plantations made a very substantial contribution for many decades, indeed for the greater part of the century after 1720. Between 1761 and 1808, British traders hauled across the Atlantic 1,428,000 African captives and pocketed £60 million - perhaps £8 billion in today's money - from slave sales.
    • Robin Blackburn, “Enslavement and Industrialisation”, BBC (17 February 2011)
  • It is estimated that the acreage required to grow the cotton, sugar and timber imported by Britain from the New World in 1830 would have been somewhere between 25 and 30 million acres - or more than Britain's total arable and pasture land combined.
    By this time some European countries were refining sugar from beets, but this would have also required vast acreage. Wood could, perhaps, have been imported from elsewhere and was anyway not mainly logged by slave labourers. But as Pomeranz observes: raising enough sheep to replace the yarn made with Britain's New World cotton imports would have required staggering quantities of land, almost nine million acres in 1815 ... and over 23 million acres by 1830.'
    One might add that cotton yarn was much more suitable for early industrial processes than wool, and that the price paid for each pound of raw cotton dropped by one half between 1790 and 1820 as an expanding slave population, the new cotton gin and steam transport opened the inland states to cotton cultivation.
    While the acres of fertile land were an 'ecological windfall', the forced labour of several million enslaved people brought them swiftly into cultivation. As late as 1860, six million slaves toiled in the fields of the American South, Cuba and Brazil, producing vast quantities of cotton, sugar and coffee. The thousands of millions of hours of slave toil helped to underpin the global ascendancy of Victorian Britain.
    Overall, enslaved people on the plantations of the Americas made a large and measurable contribution to British prosperity. While the idea of inherited guilt is wrong-headed - we are not responsible for our forebears' crimes and misdeeds - the idea of inherited privilege is perfectly valid.
    • Robin Blackburn, “Enslavement and Industrialisation”, BBC (17 February 2011)
  • In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave — the law is fixed and established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable. Men will sometimes sell themselves for a meal of victuals or contract with another who acts as surety on his [sic] bond to work out the amount of the bond upon his [sic] release from jail. Any such contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract to be made violates these statutes.
    • Attorney General Francis Biddle (1941). "Circular No. 3591, Re: Involuntary Servitude, Slavery, and Peonage." Francis Biddle to All United States Attorneys, Dec. 12, 1941, File 50-821, Record Group 60, Department of Justice, National Archives
  • Let tyrants shake their iron rod, and slavery clank her galling chains. We fear them not, we trust in God. New England's God forever reigns. The foe comes on with haughty stride. Our troops advance with martial noise. Their veterans flee before our youth, and generals yield to beardless boys.
  • Personally I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was – how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition, but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today.
  • Slavery was widely practiced, and deeply rooted in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans.
  • Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than the most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens against another portion, the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude, or absolute extermination, in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence.
  • The master-slave relationship is the most popular fantasy perversion in the literature of pornography. The image of a scantly clothed slave girl, always nubile, always beautiful, always docile, who sinks to her knees gracefully and dutifully before her master, who stands with or without boots, with or without whip, is commonly accepted as a scene of titillating sexuality. From the slave harems of the Orient potentate, celebrated in poetry and dance, to the breathless description of light-skinned fancy women, de rigueur in a particular genre of pulp historical fiction, the glorification of forced sex under slavery, institutional rape, has been a part of our cultural heritage, feeding the egos of men while subverting the egos of women—and doing irreprable damaage to the healthy sexual process. The very word "slave girl" impart to many a vision of voluptuous sexuality redolent of perfumes gardens and soft music strummed on a lyre. Such is the legacy of male-controlled sexuality under which we struggle.
  • you who feel the sobs of the homeland that breathes slavery
    • tu que sientes los gemidos de la patria que respira esclavitud
    • Canción de la verdad sencilla/Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos translated by Jack Agüeros (1997)
  • Conquer thyself. Till thou hast done that, thou art a slave; for it is almost as well to be in subjection to another's appetite as thine own.
    • Robert Burton, as quoted in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 377

C

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Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion. The man who has sufficient power over himself to wait until his nature has recovered its even balance is the truly wise man, but such beings are seldom met with. ~ Giacomo Casanova
You cannot make soldiers of slaves, nor slaves of soldiers. ~ Howell Cobb
There is no substitute for a militant freedom. The only alternative is submission and slavery. ~ Calvin Coolidge
The Democratic Party then, as now, was in open alliance with slavery, in a conspiracy against the Constitution and the peace of the country. ~ George William Curtis
  • Scripture points out this difference between believers and unbelievers; the latter, as old slaves of their incurable perversity, cannot endure the rod; but the former, like children of noble birth, profit by repentance and correction.
    • John Calvin, Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life, pg. 57
  • The slave-holder claims the slave as his Property. The very idea of a slave is, that he belongs to another, that he is bound to live and labor for another, to be another’s instrument, and to make another’s will his habitual law, however adverse to his own. Another owns him, and, of course, has a right to his time and strength, a right to the fruits of his labor, a right to task him without his consent, and to determine the kind and duration of his toil, a right to confine him to any bounds, a right to extort the required work by stripes, a right, in a word, to use him as a tool, without contract, against his will, and in denial of his right to dispose of himself, or to use his power for his own good. “A slave,” says the Louisiana code, “is in the power of the master to whom he belongs. The master may sell him, dispose of his person, his industry, his labor; he can do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire any thing, but which must belong to his master.” “Slaves shall be deemed, taken, reputed, and adjudged,” say the South-Carolina laws, “to be chattels personal in the hands of their masters, and possessions to all intents and purposes whatsoever.” Such is slavery, a claim to man as property. Now this claim of property in a human being is altogether false, groundless. No such right of man in man can exist. A human being cannot be justly owned. To hold and treat him as property is to inflict a great wrong, to incur the guilt of oppression.
  • For, what is slavery?  It is the complete and absolute subjection of one person to the control and disposal of another person, by legalized force.  We need not argue that no person can be, rightfully, compelled to submit to such control and disposal.  All such subjection must originate in force; and, private force not being strong enough to accomplish the purpose, public force, in the form of law, must lend its aid.  The Government comes to the help of the individual slaveholder, and punishes resistance to his will, and compels submission.  THE GOVERNMENT, therefore, in the case of every individual slave, is THE REAL ENSLAVER, depriving each person enslaved of all liberty and all property, and all that makes life dear, without imputation of crime or any legal process whatsoever.  This is precisely what the Government of the United States is forbidden to do by the Constitution.  The Government of the United States, therefore, cannot create or continue the relation of master and slave.  Nor can that relation be created or continued in any place, district, or territory, over which the jurisdiction of the National Government is exclusive; for slavery cannot subsist a moment after the support of the public force has been withdrawn.
  • The proposition to make soldiers of our slaves is the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began. It is to me a source of deep mortification and regret to see the name of that good and great man and soldier, General R. E. Lee, given as authority for such a policy. My first hour of despondency will be the one in which that policy shall be adopted. You cannot make soldiers of slaves, nor slaves of soldiers. The moment you resort to negro soldiers your white soldiers will be lost to you; and one secret of the favor with which the proposition is received in portions of the army is the hope that when negroes go into the Army they will be permitted to retire. It is simply a proposition to fight the balance of the war with negro troops. You can't keep white and black troops together, and you can't trust negroes by themselves. It is difficult to get negroes enough for the purpose indicated in the President's message, much less enough for an Army. Use all the negroes you can get, for all the purposes for which you need them, but don't arm them. The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong. But they won't make soldiers. As a class they are wanting in every qualification of a soldier. Better by far to yield to the demands of England and France and abolish slavery and thereby purchase their aid, than resort to this policy, which leads as certainly to ruin and subjugation as it is adopted; you want more soldiers, and hence the proposition to take negroes into the Army. Before resorting to it, at least try every reasonable mode of getting white soldiers. I do not entertain a doubt that you can, by the volunteering policy, get more men into the service than you can arm. I have more fears about arms than about men, For Heaven’s sake, try it before you fill with gloom and despondency the hearts of many of our truest and most devoted men, by resort to the suicidal policy of arming our slaves.
    • Howell Cobb, regarding suggestions that the Confederates turn their slaves into soldiers (1865). As quoted in Encyclopædia Britannica (1911), Hugh Chisholm, editor, 11th ed., Cambridge University Press. Also quoted as 'You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong'.
  • No slave in this State shall be emancipated by any act done to take effect in this State, or any other country.
    • Article IV, Section 1, Constitution of the State of Alabama (1861)
  • The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states, and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any state of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property: and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
  • Mother do you know I asked myself this question. What right have I simply because I am white to be the master race, while this man knowing more than I should be a slave because he is black?
  • There is no substitute for a militant freedom. The only alternative is submission and slavery.
    • Calvin Coolidge, The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses, Coolidge, The Minerva Group (2001), p. 159
    • Acceptance of the Memorial to General Ulysses S. Grant (27 April 1922)
  • I would not have a slave to till my ground,
    To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
    And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
    That sinews bought and sold have ever earn'd.
  • Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
    Receive our air, that moment they are free;
    They touch our country, and their shackles fall.
  • As to any other laws that slave-holders may make among themselves, as respecting slaves, they can be of no better kind, nor give them any better character, than what is implied in the common report—that there may be some honesty among thieves.
  • There was not in all the colonial legislation of America one single law which recognized the rightfulness of slavery in the abstract; that in 1774 Virginia stigmatized the slave-trade as 'wicked, cruel, and unnatural'; that in the same year Congress protested against it 'under the sacred ties of virtue, honor, and love of country'; that in 1775 the same Congress denied that God intended one man to own another as a slave; that the new Discipline of the Methodist Church, in 1784, and the Pastoral Letter of the Presbyterian Church, in 1788, denounced slavery; that abolition societies existed in slave States, and that it was hardly the interest even of the cotton-growing States, where it took a slave a day to clean a pound of cotton, to uphold the system... Jefferson, in his address to the Virginia Legislature of 1774, says that 'the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of desire in these colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state'; and while he constantly remembers to remind us that the Jeffersonian prohibition of slavery in the territories was lost in 1784, he forgets to add that it was lost, not by a majority of votes — for there were sixteen in its favor to seven against it — but because the sixteen votes did not represent two thirds of the States; and he also incessantly forgets to tell us that this Jeffersonian prohibition was restored by the Congress of 1785, and erected into the famous Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was re-enacted by the first Congress of the United States and approved by the first President.
  • The Democratic Party then, as now, was in open alliance with slavery, in a conspiracy against the Constitution and the peace of the country.
  • If Washington or Jefferson or Madison should utter upon his native soil today the opinions he entertained and expressed upon this question, he would be denounced as a fanatical abolitionist. To declare the right of all men to liberty is sectional, because slavery is afraid of liberty and strikes the mouth that speaks the word. To preach slavery is not sectional — no: because freedom respects itself and believes in itself enough to give an enemy fair play. Thus Boston asked Senator Toombs to come and say what he could for slavery. I think Boston did a good thing, but I think Senator Toombs is not a wise man, for he went. He went all the way from Georgia to show Massachusetts how slavery looks, and to let it learn what it has to say. When will Georgia ask Wendell Phillips or Charles Sumner to come down and show her how liberty looks and speaks?
  • I confess I secretly suspect the Republicanism of an orator who is more anxious to show his hearers that he respects what he calls the rights of slavery than that he loves the rights of man. If God be just and the human instinct true, slavery has no rights at all. It has only a legalized toleration. Have I a right to catch a weaker man than I, and appropriate him, his industry, and his family, forever, against his will, to my service? Because if I have, any man stronger than I has the same right over me. But if I have not, what possible right is represented by the two thousand million dollars of property in human beings in this country? It is the right of Captain Kidd on the sea, of Dick Turpin on the land. I certainly do not say that every slave-holder is a bad man, because I know the contrary. The complicity of many with the system is inherited, and often unwilling. But to rob a man of his liberty, to make him so far as possible a brute and a thing, is not less a crime against human nature because it is organized into a hereditary system of frightful proportions. A wrong does not become a right by being vested.
  • As to the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle, that, it is true, has been heretofore countenanced by the Province Laws formerly, but nowhere is it expressly enacted or established. It has been a usage–a usage which took its origin from the practice of some of the European nations, and the regulations of British government respecting the then-colonies, for the benefit of trade and wealth. But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of liberty, with which Heaven, without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses-features, has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our constitution of government, by which the people of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal, and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property–and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract.
  • Independence without slavery, would be valueless... The South without slavery would not be worth a mess of pottage.
    • Caleb Cutwell, as quoted in a letter to the Galvaston Tri-Weekly] (22 February 1865)
  • We have got to choose between two results. With these four millions of Negroes, either you must have four millions of disfranchised, disarmed, untaught, landless, thriftless, non-producing, non-consuming, degraded men, or else you must have four millions of land-holding, industrious, arms-bearing, and voting population. Choose between the two! Which will you have?

D

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We are not influenced by any contracted or interested motives, but a general philanthropy for all mankind, of whatever climate, language, or complexion. We hereby declare our disapprobation and abhorrence of the unnatural practice of slavery... We therefore resolve, at all times to use our utmost endeavors for the manumission of slaves. ~ Darien Committee
Slavery is essentially barbarous in its character. It, above all things else, dreads the presence of an advanced civilization. It flourishes best where it meets no reproving frowns, and hears no condemning voices. ~ Frederick Douglass
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck. ~ Frederick Douglass
  • To show the world that we are not influenced by any contracted or interested motives, but a general philanthropy for all mankind, of whatever climate, language, or complexion, we hereby declare our disapprobation and abhorrence of the unnatural practice of slavery in America, however the uncultivated state of our country, or other specious arguments may plead for it, a practice founded in injustice and cruelty, and highly dangerous to our liberties, as well as our lives, debasing part of our fellow-creatures below men, and corrupting the virtue and morals of the rest; and is laying the basis of that liberty we contend for, and which we pray the Almighty to continue to the latest posterity, upon a very wrong foundation. We therefore resolve, at all times to use our utmost endeavors for the manumission of slaves.
  • Expediency governed the slave-holders' posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles.
  • In 1770, on the eve of the American Revolution, African American slavery was legal and almost unquestioned throughout the New World. The ghastly slave trade from Africa was still expanding and for many decades had been shipping five Africans across the Atlantic for every European immigrant to the Americas. An imaginary “hemispheric traveler” would have seen black slaves in every colony from Canada and New England all the way south to Spanish Peru and Chile. In the incomparably rich colonies of the Caribbean, they often constituted population majorities of 90 percent or more. But in 1888, one hundred and eighteen years later, when Brazil finally freed all its slaves, the institution had been outlawed throughout the Western Hemisphere. This final act of liberation, building on Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation achievement in the American Civil War, took place only a century after the creation of the first antislavery societies in human history—initially small groups in such places as Philadelphia, London, Manchester, and New York. The abolition of New World slavery depended in large measure on a major transformation in moral perception—on the emergence of writers, speakers, and reformers, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, who were willing to condemn an institution that had been sanctioned for thousands of years and who also strove to make human society something more than an endless contest of greed and power.
    • David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006), p. 1
  • Why, then, in the absence of all control over the subject of African slavery, are you agitated in relation to it? With Pharisaical pretension it is sometimes said it is a moral obligation to agitate, and I suppose they are going through a sort of vicarious repentance for other men's sins. ... Who gave them a right to decide that it is a sin? By what standard do they measure it? Not the Constitution; the Constitution recognizes the property in many forms, and imposes obligations in connection with that recognition. Not the Bible; that justifies it. Not the good of society; for if they go where it exists, they find that society recognizes it as good...
  • The middle of the fourth millennium B.C. is the period at which Neolithic society in the great eastern river valleys developed the first form of civilization. ...For understanding how the impressive technological achievements of the early civilizations were brought about, it is important to notice that, even when the tiller of the soil was regarded as a free man rather than as a serf, forced labor on public works was commonly exacted (in Egypt it was still customary when de Lesseps began to dig the Suez Canal)... we may trace from this period the growth of slavery, which had its origin at the stage when it first paid to keep captives alive because their work was worth more than their keep. Every war produced its quota of human plunder; traders, too, dealt rapidly in a commodity that could carry itself to market; and within the community enslavement was commonly the fate of the criminal and the debtor. Slaves of the god or of his temple and of the king or of his state provided a numerous body of workers, sometimes well trained and often cruelly exploited, while throughout ancient history almost every reference to agriculture or industry in civilized countries must be taken to imply the employment of slaves, usually in small numbers, alongside farmers and craftsmen enjoying different degrees of personal freedom.
    • T. K. Derry & Trevor I. Williams, A Short History of Technology: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900 (1960) Ch.1 General Historical Survey; "Mesopotamian and Egyptian Civilizations"
  • How great was the temptation to use... slaves of the state as easily expendable pioneers may perhaps be judged by the fact that in an age of machinery prisoners of war have been worked to death in railway building, in Europe as well as Asia. Secondly, the city of Rome under the early empire, with perhaps 200,000 slaves in a total population of less than a million, is an outstanding instance... for example, 660 slaves maintained the 280 miles of aqueducts which gave a daily water supply of 38 gallons a head. Finally, there was the exploitation of slave labour in mining, which was used to enrich the kingdom of David and Solomon as well as the fifth-century Athenian democracy and spread as far west as Roman Spain: this won the metals, on which technical progress largely depended, by methods that stretched manpower to exhaustion. We lack the details, but Diodorus Siculus in the reign of Augustus writes that in the Spanish silver-mines the strongest workers were the most unfortunate, because they were the slowest to die.
    • T. K. Derry & Trevor I. Williams, A Short History of Technology: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900 (1960) Ch.5, Building Construction, "Man and Animal Power
  • Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.
  • Once Diogenes, who was washing vegetables, ridiculed him as he passed by, and said, "If you had learnt to eat these vegetables, you would not have been a slave in the palace of a tyrant." But Aristippus replied, "And you, if you had known how to behave among men, would not have been washing vegetables."
  • When some one boasted that at the Pythian games he had vanquished men, Diogenes replied, "Nay, I defeat men, you defeat slaves."
  • To Xeniades, who had purchased Diogenes at the slave market, he said, "Come, see that you obey orders."
  • Once a man has tasted freedom he will never be content to be a slave.
    • Walt Disney, Radio address "Our American Culture" broadcast during an intermission of the Metropolitan Opera. (1 March 1941)
  • I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.
  • I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.
  • When their day's work in the field is down, the most of them have their washing, mending and cooking to do, and having few or none of the ordinary facilities for doing either of these, very many of their sleeping hours are consumed in preparing for the field the coming day; and when this is done…they drop down side by side on one common bed - the cold damp floor…
  • 'Inferiority' is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved.
  • No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
    • Frederick Douglass, Speech at Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Washington, D.C. (22 October 1883)
  • Slavery was the wickedest thing in the world, the greatest curse the earth had ever felt... The sin of slavery is so clearly written out, and so much talked against, that if any one says he don't know, and has not heard, he must, I think, be a liar.
    • John Dumont (1849), a former slaveholder and former master of Sojourner Truth. As quoted in Olive Gilbert & Sojourner Truth (1878), Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Bondswoman of Olden Time, page 124
  • God has authorized the practice of slavery, not only by the bare permission of his Providence, but the express provision of his word. Therefore, slavery is not a moral evil.

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The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class. ~ Friedrich Engels
  • Slavery is disheartening; but Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself of every last wrong. But the spasms of nature are centuries and ages and will tax the faith of shortlived men. Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely. The proverbs of the nations affirm these delays, but affirm the arrival. They say, "God may consent, but not forever." The delay of the Divine Justice — this was the meaning and soul of the Greek Tragedy, — this was the soul of their religion.
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, in "The Fugitive Slave Law" , Lecture in New York City (7 March 1854), The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1904), p. 238
  • I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute a state. I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.
  • As long as an heir is underage, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.
  • But this is slavery, not to speak one's thought.
    • Euripides, The Phoenician Women, line 392; reported in David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds., The Complete Greek Tragedies (1958), vol. 4, p. 392

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Roy Batty: Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave. ~ Hampton Fancher and David Peoples
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. ~ Erich Fromm
  • Control every single moment of a slaves life, every minute of their day; it would tell them where to go, what to wear, where to sleep, when to work, when to eat, what to eat, when to speak, when to be silent. This is probably the biggest form of government that human beings have ever invented in the whole of history.
  • Meanwhile, running counter to all the grandiose plans for German colonization of foreign living space, the insatiable demand for labour of the Third Reich's military-industrial complex and the conscription of a rising share of able-bodied Germans into the armed forces meant that Germany itself began to be 'colonized' by foreign workers. The number in the Reich rose from 301,000 in 1939 (less than 1 per cent of all employees) to around two million in the autumn of 1940, to more than seven million by 1944 - nearly a fifth of the workforce. They came from all over Europe, some voluntarily, others under duress: from Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland and Italy; from Hungary and Yugoslavia too. At first, it was skilled workers from Western Europe who were attracted by the rapidly growing German economy; the men who built the road to the Eagle's Nest were in fact Italian stonemasons, willing beneficiaries of Hitler's boom. As the war wore on, however, it was Poles who came to predominate. Few of them came of their own volition.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 460
  • Already in September 1941 there were more than a million Poles working in the Reich, accounting for just under half the total foreign workforce. By July 1943 around 1.3 million workers, not including prisoners of war, had been sent to the Reich from the Government-General. There were soon more Poles in Germany than Germans in Poland. After 1941 they were joined by comparable numbers of Ukrainians and other former Soviet citizens. Many of these were women; in the autumn of 1943, there were 1.7 million female foreign workers employed in the Reich, most of them from occupied Polish or Soviet territory. Here was a headache for a regime that aspired to Germanizing Europe - an ethnographic Europeanization of Germany, a process in conflict at once with their own racial theory and with the sentiments of ordinary Germans.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 461
Economic actors were the architects of the slave plantation systems that came to dominate American society from the Southern United States to the Caribbean and Brazil. It was merchants and planters, not statesmen and jurists, who determined that slave labor was more profitable than free. ... This history constitutes a welcome corrective to the fashionable view that free markets automatically promote social justice. ~ Eric Foner
  • Slavery was a byproduct of the quest for profit—economic actors were the architects of the slave plantation systems that came to dominate American society from the Southern United States to the Caribbean and Brazil. It was merchants and planters, not statesmen and jurists, who determined that slave labor was more profitable than free. ... This history constitutes a welcome corrective to the fashionable view that free markets automatically promote social justice.
    • Eric Foner, "Plantation Profiteering" The Nation March 31, 1997 p. 25
  • Now, as then, commerce unrestrained by social control ends up stripping economic relations of all moral content, while the drive toward fulfilling market demands at the lowest possible price creates widespread indifference to the conditions under which marketable goods are produced. Today’s Chinatown sweatshops and Third World child labor factories are the functional equivalents of colonial slavery in that the demands of the consumer and the profit drive of the entrepreneur overwhelm the rights of those whose labor actually produces the salable commodity.
    • Eric Foner, "Plantation Profiteering" The Nation March 31, 1997 p. 28
  • This fight is against slavery; if we lose it, you will be made free.
  • Renfield: I'm loyal to you, Master, I am your slave, I didn't betray you! Oh, no, don't! Don't kill me! Let me live, please! Punish me, torture me, but let me live! I can't die with all those lives on my conscience! All that blood on my hands!
  • Every man of the commonalty (excepting infants, insane persons, and criminals) is, of common right, and by the laws of God, a freeman, and entitled to the free enjoyment of liberty. ...liberty or freedom consists in having an actual share in the appointment of those who are to frame the laws and who are to be the guardians of every man's life, property, and peace. For the all of one man is as dear to him as the all of another; and the poor man has an equal right, but more need to have representatives in the Legislature than the rich one. ...they who have no voice or vote in the electing of representatives, do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes and their representatives; for to be enslaved is to have governors whom other men have set over us, and to be subject to laws made by the representatives of others, without having had representatives of our own to give consent in our behalf.
  • In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man’s nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become "Golems”; they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.
    • Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955), Ch. 9: Summary — Conclusion, p. 102
    • Fromm is here referencing a statement made by Adlai Stevenson at Columbia University in 1954, which he had quoted earlier in the work: "We are not in danger of becoming slaves any more, but of becoming robots.”
  • But on the other hand we must remember, as the point that was made, is that the church is very loose on moral evils, because although they try to accuse people like me, who believe in empiricism and the Enlightenment, of somehow what they call moral relativism, as if it’s some appalling sin, where what it actually means is thought, they for example thought that slavery was perfectly fine, absolutely okay, and then they didn’t. And what is the point of the Catholic church if it says ‘oh, well we couldn’t know better because nobody else did,’ then what are you for?

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The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission. ~ James A. Garfield
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be holy. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man. ~ Ulysses S. Grant
Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave. ~ G. I. Gurdjieff
  • The will of the nation, speaking with the voice of battle and through the amended Constitution, has fulfilled the great promise of 1776 by proclaiming 'liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.' The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. NO thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than 5,000,000 people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness.
  • The sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.
  • The day of happiness will be the memorable day of the emancipation of the people, and the day of emancipation will be the one when the great are put down and the small raised up; when there are neither masters nor slaves; bosses nor subordinates; powerful nor weak; oppressors nor oppressed; but when the vast Brazil is called the common homeland of Brazilian citizens or United States of Brazil.
  • Oh, give us a flag, all free without a slave! We'll fight to defend it, as our fathers did so brave.
  • I heard my mother remark occasionally: 'A man who accepts a job under anyone is a slave.' That impression became so indelibly fixed that even after my marriage I refused all positions. I met expenses by investing my family endowment in land. Moral: Good and positive suggestions should instruct the sensitive ears of children. Their early ideas long remain sharply etched.
  • Do not allow yourself to be thrashed by the provoking whip of a beautiful face. How can sense slaves enjoy the world? Its subtle flavours escape them while they grovel in primal mud. All nice discriminations are lost to the man of elemental lusts.
  • I believe the slave trade to be by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind in any Christian or pagan country.
  • If one looks across the expanse of history, one cannot help but notice a curious sense of identification between the most exalted and the most degraded; particularly, between emperors and kings, and slaves. Many kings have surrounded themselves with slaves, appoint slave ministers-there have even been, as with the Mamluks of Egypt, actual dynasties of slaves. Kings surround themselves with slaves for the same reason they surround themselves with eunuchs: because the slaves and criminals have no families or friends, no possibility of other loyalties-or at least that, in principle, they shouldn't. But in a way, kings should really be like that too. As many an African proverb emphasizes: a proper king has no relatives either, or at least, he acts as if he does not. In other words, the king and slave are mirror images, in that unlike normal human beings who are defined by their commitments to others, they are defined only by relations of power. They are as close to perfectly isolated, alienated beings as one can possibly become.
  • As soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.
    • Ulysses S. Grant, to Otto von Bismarck (June 1878), as quoted in Around the World with General Grant (1879)
  • It is with regret that I have again to announce a continuance of the disturbed condition of the island of Cuba. No advance toward the pacification of the discontented part of the population has been made. While the insurrection has gained no advantages and exhibits no more of the elements of power or of the prospects of ultimate success than were exhibited a year ago, Spain, on the other hand, has not succeeded in its repression, and the parties stand apparently in the same relative attitude which they have occupied for a long time past. This contest has lasted now for more than four years. Were its scene at a distance from our neighborhood, we might be indifferent to its result, although humanity could not be unmoved by many of its incidents wherever they might occur. It is, however, at our door. I can not doubt that the continued maintenance of slavery in Cuba is among the strongest inducements to the continuance of this strife. A terrible wrong is the natural cause of a terrible evil.
  • For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the great war of sections, there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be holy. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.
  • At the time of writing there are, by one measure, more slaves in the world than at any time in history: 27 million people all told, in forced labour camps, debt bondage, the sex industry, professional beggary, domestic servitude, and work—work without pay and under threat of violence, which is the definition of slavery—in agriculture, mining and factories. A very large proportion of them are children, many of whom are commercially trafficked….
    Those who are enslaved by history—who dwell on past wrongs, who keep ancient conflicts and quarrels alive, who even seek reparations for the wrongs suffered by their ancestors—would do the world a greater service by turning their attention to present-day slavery instead. A concerted effort might open the gates of China’s forced labour camps, free the Haitian sugar-plantation slaves, rescue the child prostitutes of Southeast Asia, and end the chattel slavery in Mauritania and the Sudan where slave markets still exist and where you can buy six children for one Kalashnikov.
    • A. C. Grayling, Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), ISBN 0-19-517755-X, Chapter 42, "Slavery" (ellipsis represents the elision of one paragraph of examples)
  • 'I got me slaves and slave-girls.' For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's?
    • Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes, Hall and Moriarty, tr., de Gruyter (New York, 1993) p. 74
  • Did not Jesus condemn slavery? Let us examine some of his precepts. "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them", Let every slaveholder apply these queries to his own heart; Am I willing to be a slave —Am I willing to see my wife the slave of another — Am I willing to see my mother a slave, or my father, my sister or my brother? If not, then in holding others as slaves, I am doing what I would not wish to be done to me or any relative I have; and thus have I broken this golden rule which was given me to walk by".

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  • Time-servers are the cowering slaves of slaves,
    Alone on earth, who serves the Lord is free,
    Each soul shall win the gift that it most craves;
    Seek God, my soul — God shall your portion be!
  • The laws of certain states …give an ownership in the service of negroes as personal property…. But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty—and when the captor in war …thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.
  • Besides being able to borrow on personal security, an individual might sell himself or a family member into slavery.
    • Code of Hammurabi; as quoted in Anthony Appiah, Martin Bunzl (2007-07-02), Buying freedom, pp. 95–97, ISBN 978-0-691-13010-1
    • Alternate translation: If any one fail to meet a claim for debt, and sell himself, his wife, his son, and daughter for money or give them away to forced labor: they shall work for three years in the house of the man who bought them, or the proprietor, and in the fourth year they shall be set free.
    • "The Code of Hammurabi. Translated by L. W. King". The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy. Yale Law School. Retrieved (12 March 2018)
  • It is a sad state of affairs when we have a culture that rightly hates slavery and looks back upon our history of enslaving an entire people group with revulsion and horror and yet, apparently, cannot see that we are doing the exact same thing with a different group of people. We have dehumanized the unborn and turned them into legal property to be kept or discarded at the whim of the 'owner' just as we did for blacks in the days of slavery. It was a shame then and it is a shame now. It must stop. We have to recognize and protect the inherent human rights of all human beings, regardless of race, age, gender, disability, or location.
  • Loy Cannon: How do you think they feel, being owned? Imagine if these dolls rose up and became citizens of this apartment. Imagine if they asked for equal rights? You might say, "Man, fuck these dolls. I'm gonna crush these dolls, thinking they all human, thinking they equal." 'Cause that's your mindset. And look, maybe you feel like these Italians own you, but you got no idea what it feels like to be actual owned, to be property. Until now. 'Cause I own you. You're gonna help me win this war or I'm gonna put you in the ground, you hear me?
  • Are we disposed to be the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. [...] Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
    • Atributed to Patrick Henry from a speech he made to the Second Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775. The speech was not published until The Port Folio printed a version of it in 1816. The version of the speech that is known today first appeared in print in Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, a biography of Henry by William Wirt in 1817. There is debate among historians as to whether and to what extent Henry or Wirt should be credited with authorship of the speech and its famous closing words.
  • I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery.
  • The selling and enslaving of the human species is a direct violation of the natural rights alike vested in them by their creator, and utterly inconsistent with the avowed principles on which this, and the other states have carried on their struggle for liberty.
  • I don't think we can imagine what slavery has done to the people here, it goes very deep, these things take a very long time long, even the opposition to colonialism has traces of it. Here it was quite late, 1830, but a little further west, slavery lasted 3 to 4 centuries, 40 to 60 million people are estimated, were moved from here, to America, that's no small thing, you would say that is an African holocaust.

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  • We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

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It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused. ~ John Jay
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.  Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. ~ Thomas Jefferson
What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose powers supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. ~ Thomas Jefferson
This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it. ~ Thomas Jefferson
The hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come. ~ Thomas Jefferson
  • There are and always will be some who, ashamed of the behavior of their ancestors, try to prove that slavery wasn't so bad after all, that its evils and its cruelty were the exaggerations of propagandists and not the habitual lot of the slaves. Men will say (and accept) anything in order to foster national pride or soothe a troubled conscience.
  • That men should pray and fight for their own freedom, and yet keep others in slavery, is certainly acting a very inconsistent, as well as unjust and, perhaps, impious part, but the history of mankind is filled with instances of human improprieties.
  • It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.
  • There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.  Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him.
  • What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose powers supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.
  • I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your state for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it forever. This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.
  • Your favour of July 31, was duly received, and was read with peculiar pleasure. The sentiments breathed through the whole do honor to both the head and heart of the writer. Mine on the subject of slavery of negroes have long since been in possession of the public, and time has only served to give them stronger root. The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.
  • Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour’s service without wages and giveth him not for his work.
    • Jeremiah 22:13
  • The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.
    • Jesus as reported in Matthew 20:25-27. * The Greeks used the slaves, with which their frequent wars supplied them, in all kinds of menial and laborious occupations, and a notion that such occupations could not be filled without slaves, became so familiar, that even their acutest philosophers seem never to have doubted its accuracy or justice. A commonwealth, says Aristotle, consists of families, and a family to be complete must consist of freemen and slaves, and in fixing on the form of government, which according to him would be most perfect, and conduce the most to the happiness of mankind, he requires that his territory should be cultivated by slaves of different races and destitute of spirit, that so they may be useful for labor, and that the absence of any disposition to revolt may be securely relied on. 2 The condition of Africa is now in this particular, much like that of Greece then. One of the late travellers was explaining to an African chief that there are no slaves in England. "No slaves," exclaimed their auditor, "then what do you do "for servants?"
    • Richard Jones, Peasant rents : being the first half of an essay on the distribution of wealth and on the sources of taxation (1831), pp. 68-69
  • Slavery was a fact of life throughout the ancient world. Slaves – people defined as property, forced to work, stripped of their rights, and socially ‘dead,’ could be found in every significant realm of the age. In China, the Qin, Han, and Xin dynasties enforced various forms of slavery; so too did ancient rulers of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and India. ‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves,’ God told the Israelites, asking them only to refrain from enslaving one another. Yet Rome was different. There have been a bare few handful of examples in recorded history of true ‘slave-states’ in which slavery permeated every facet of society, and on which an entire economy and culture was built. Rome was one.
    • Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages (2021), p. 26
  • Yet despite occasional slave rebellions – most famously the Spartacus War of 73 BC – there was no movement to abolish Roman slaveholding, seemingly on the part of anyone. Only occasionally were efforts made to protect slaves from the grossest abuses: Hadrian (r. AD 117-138) unsuccessfully tried to stop slave-traders castrating African boys, while Constantine I (AD 307-337) forbade the practice of facial tattooing – an edict very likely made with overzealous slave-owners in mind. But to go very much further – still less to contemplate a world without slaves – would have been nonsensical. Philosophically, slavery was assumed to be essential to a free society – a natural phenomenon without which liberty for the true and noble Roman could not exist. Economically, the entire edifice of Rome and its empire relied upon mass bondage, facilitated by the same long and complex trading networks that supplied the empire with essential commodities and luxury goods. Ultimately, Rome was a patriarchal society in which slaves occupied a position of inferiority that was simply their lot. John Chrysostom, a Christian preacher of the late third century AD, sketched out this hierarchy for his audience. Even in a poor man’s house, he said: ‘the man rules his wife, the wife rules the slaves, the slaves rule their own wives, and again the men and women rule the children’. During the Middle Ages that followed, slavery declined in scale, yet it remained ubiquitous across the west. And even in places where slavery seemed to die out, its place as a pillar of economy and culture was often replaced by serfdom – a system of human bondage to the land. This was not quite the same as chattel slavery, although the difference would have felt slight to the people involved. And a large part of western attachment to slaving sprang from the fact that slavery had been indistinguishable from Rome’s swaggering glory.
    • Dan Jones, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages (2021), pp. 30-31

K

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  • Who cares if it's legal? I don't care if it's legal. Slavery was legal once too, and not just in America, but just about every other country in the world. The powerful have always legalized their subjugation of the less powerful.
  • It is to meekness that Christ summons his followers: Learn from me, for I am meek and lowly of heart. Yes, he was meek. He did indeed carry lightly the heavy burden that far exceeded the powers of a human being, indeed, of humankind. But when someone, at the same time as he himself is carrying this heaviest burden, has the time and the willingness and sympathy and self-sacrifice to concern himself unceasingly with others, to help others, to heal the sick, to visit the miserable, to rescue the despairing-is he not carrying the burden lightly! He carried the heaviest burden in solicitude, solicitude for fallen humankind; but he carried it so lightly that he did not quench a smoking wick or break a bruised reed. As the prototype was, so also ought the follower to be. Thus, if the one who does not know today what he is going to have tomorrow, if he, in accordance with the Gospel test (since Christ did not come into the world in order to abolish worry about making a living by bringing prosperity), does not worry about tomorrow, then he is indeed carrying the heavy burden lightly. If someone who is born a slave, if he, according to the apostle’s fervent admonition (for Christ did not come in order to abolish slavery, even though that will follow from it) is not concerned about freedom and only if it is offered chooses to be free-then he is carrying the heavy burden lightly.
  • Racial segregation must be seen for what it is — and that is an evil system, a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity.
  • If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.
  • I have a dream: that one day, right down in Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to live together as brothers.
  • I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.
  • We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.
  • "When Charles Darwin entered the world 200 years ago, there was one clear and simple answer to the slave's question. All men were men and brothers, because all were descended from Adam. By the time Darwin had reached adulthood, however, opinions around him were growing more equivocal [...] By the mid-19th-century, many influential voices denied that the enslaved African was a brother, and it was broadly taken for granted that as a man, he was of an inferior sort to his white master".
  • “In one sense of the word” observes Robert Lee Hales, “no labor is “involuntary"-not even that of a slave. It is performed through the voluntary muscular movements of the laborer, who chooses to perform it in order to avoid something worse. Obviously, the word is not used in the Thirteenth Amendment in this restricted sense.” Nat Turner, who has hanged in Virginia in 1831 after leading a bloody slave rebellion, would probably have agreed with Hegel that “if a man is a slave, his own will is responsible for his slavery, just as it is its will which is responsible if a people is subjugated. Hence the wrong of slavery lies at the door not simply of enslavers or conquerors but of the slaves and the conquered themselves.” But Hegel did not infer that slavery therefore was legitimate. If the ubiquity of consent in this sense is not to vitiate the thirteenth amendment altogether, the amendment must be understood as standing for the proposition that there are certain choices that a person should not find herself having to make: specifically, choices between submitting to servitude or denying a need (for example, the need for food, or to be free form pain) that almost all human beings find irresistible. That is why the courts should not give their imprimatur to choices made under such circumstances.

L

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If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave? ~ James Russell Lowell
If any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. ~ Abraham Lincoln
Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises. ~ Abraham Lincoln
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. ~ Abraham Lincoln
Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature — opposition to it, in his love of justice. ~ Abraham Lincoln
You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. ~ Abraham Lincoln
This is a world of compensation; and he would be no slave must consent to have no slaves. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it. ~ Abraham Lincoln
If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave?
If ye do not feel the chain,
When it works a brother's pain,
Are ye not base slaves indeed,
Slaves unworthy to be freed? ~ James Russell Lowell
  • Q: What manner of man ought a Free and Accepted Mason to be?
A: A free man, born of a free woman, brother to a King, fellow to a Prince or to a beggar, if a Mason, and found worthy.
Q: Why freeborn?
A: In allusion to that grand festival which Abraham made at the weaning of his son Isaac, when Sarah, Abraham's wife, observing Ishmael, the son of Hagar the Egyptian bondwoman, teasing and perplexing her son, remonstrated with her husband, and said: Put away that bondwoman and her son, for such as he shall not inherit with the freeborn, even with my son Isaac. She spake as being endued with a prophetic spirit, well knowing that from Isaac's loins would spring a great and mighty people, who would serve the Lord with freedom, fervency, and zeal; and fearing that if the two youths were brought up together, Isaac might imbibe some of Ishmael's slavish principles; it being a general remark in those days, as well as the present, that the minds of slaves are more vitiated and less enlightened than those of the freeborn. This is the reason we, as Freemasons, give why every Mason ought to be freeborn; but in the present day, slavery being generally abolished, it has therefore been considered under our Constitution, that if a man be free, although he may not have been freeborn, he is eligible to be made a Mason.
  • They bound him in a narrow hold,
    With others of his kind ;
    For weeks did that accursed ship
    Sail on before the wind.
    Now shame upon the cruel wind,
    And on the cruel sea,
    That did not with some mighty storm,
    Set those poor captives free :
    . . . . .
    At length a lovely island rose
    From out the ocean wave,
    They took him to the market-place,
    And sold him for a slave.
  • We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
  • Andrew Ryan: The assassin has overcome my final defense, and now, he's come to murder me. In the end, what separates a man from a slave? Money? Power? No. A man chooses; a slave obeys. You think you have memories: a farm, a family, an airplane, a crash, and then this place. Was there really a family? Did that airplane crash, or was it hijacked? Forced down by something less than a man, something bred to sleepwalk through life until activated by a simple phrase from their kindly master? Was a man sent to kill, or a slave? A man chooses; a slave obeys.
  • Viewing the success awarded to opening up the new country as a development of Divine Providence in relation to the African family, the mind naturally turns to the probable influence it may have on negro slavery, and more especially on the practice of it by a large portion of our own race... We claim a right to speak about this evil, and also to act in reference to its removal, the more especially because we are of one blood. It is on the Anglo-American race that the hopes of the world for liberty and progress rest. Now it is very grievous to find one portion of this race practicing the gigantic evil, and the other aiding, by increased demands for the produce of slave labor, in perpetuating the enormous wrong.
  • Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.
  • If there breathe on earth a slave,
    Are ye truly free and brave?
    If ye do not feel the chain,
    When it works a brother's pain,
    Are ye not base slaves indeed,
    Slaves unworthy to be freed?
  • They are slaves who fear to speak
    For the fallen and the weak    ;
    They are slaves who will not choose
    Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
    Rather than in silence shrink
    From the truth they needs must think;
    They are slaves who dare not be
    In the right with two or three.

Abraham Lincoln

[edit]
  • If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. Why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.
  • Mr. Jefferson... a slave-holder; conceived the idea... to prevent slavery ever going into the north-western territory. ...and to cede the territory, making the prohibition of slavery therein, a condition of the deed. Congress accepted the cession... provided that slavery should never be permitted therein. ...Thenceforward, for sixty-one years, and until in 1848... all parties acted in quiet obedience to this ordinance.
  • The foregoing history may not be precisely accurate in every particular; but I am sure it is sufficiently so, for all the uses I shall attempt to make of it, and in it, we have before us, the chief material enabling us to correctly judge whether the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is right or wrong.
    I think, and shall try to show, that it is wrong; wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska—and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it.
    This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.
  • I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses north and south. Doubtless there are individuals, on both sides, who would not hold slaves under any circumstances; and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew, if it were out of existence. We know that some southern men do free their slaves, go north, and become tip-top abolitionists; while some northern ones go south, and become most cruel slave-masters.
  • Judge Douglas frequently, with bitter irony and sarcasm, paraphrases our argument by saying: "The white people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, but they are not good enough to govern a few miserable negroes!"
    Well! I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are and will continue to be as good as the average of people elsewhere. I do not say the contrary. What I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle, the sheet-anchor of American republicanism. Our Declaration of Independence says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
    I have quoted so much at this time merely to show that, according to our ancient faith, the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed. Now the relation of master and slave is pro tanto a total violation of this principle. The master not only governs the slave without his consent, but he governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow ALL the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only, is self-government.
  • Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature — opposition to it, in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Compromise — repeal all compromises — repeal the Declaration of Independence — repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man's heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.
  • Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.
  • The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.
  • If I find a venomous snake lying on the open prairie, I seize the first stick and kill him at once. But if that snake is in bed with my children, I must be more cautious. I shall, in striking the snake, also strike the children, or arouse the reptile to bite the children. Slavery is the venomous snake in bed with the children. But if the question is whether to kill it on the prairie or put it in bed with other children, I think we'd kill it!
  • "A house divided against itself cannot stand". I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.
  • What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of those may be turned against our liberties, without making us weaker or stronger for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.
    • Abraham Lincoln's speech at Edwardsville, Illinois (11 September 1858); quoted in Lincoln, Abraham; Mario Matthew Cuomo, Harold Holzer, G. S. Boritt, Lincoln on Democracy (Fordham University Press, September 1, 2004), 128. ISBN 978-0823223459.
      • Variant of the above quote: What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny All of those may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
  • That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
    • Seventh and Last Joint Debate with Steven Douglas, at Alton, Illinois (15 October 1858)
  • One of the reasons why I am opposed to slavery is just here. What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat, just what might happen to any poor man's son! I want every man to have the chance, and I believe a black man is entitled to it, in which he can better his condition. When he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.
  • Slaves are human beings. Men, not property. That some of the things, at least, stated about men in the Declaration of Independence apply to them as well as to us. I say, we think, most of us, that this charter of freedom applies to the slave as well as to ourselves, that the class of arguments put forward to batter down that idea, are also calculated to break down the very idea of a free government, even for white men, and to undermine the very foundations of free society. We think slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the territories, where our votes will reach it. We think that a respect for ourselves, a regard for future generations and for the God that made us, require that we put down this wrong where our votes will properly reach it. We think that species of labor an injury to free white men. In short, we think slavery a great moral, social, and political evil, tolerable only because, and so far as its actual existence makes it necessary to tolerate it, and that beyond that, it ought to be treated as a wrong.
  • I know there is a God, and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If He has a place and work for me–and I think He has–I believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is everything. I know I am right because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God. I have told them that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and Christ and reason say the same; and they will find it so. Douglas doesn't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down, but God cares, and humanity cares, and I care; and with God’s help I shall not fail. I may not see the end; but it will come and I shall be vindicated; and these men will find that they have not read their Bibles aright.
  • In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free; honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.
  • Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.
  • I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
    • Abraham Lincoln, in an address to an Indiana Regiment passing through Washington (17 March 1865); The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln Volume VIII
  • As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.
    • Abraham Lincoln, in notes for a speech from a fragment presented by to the Chicago Veterans Druggist's Association in 1906 by Judge James B. Bradwell, who claimed to have received it from Mary Todd Lincoln. Collected Works, 2:532
  • In reference to you, colored people, let me say God has made you free. Although you have been deprived of your God-given rights by your so-called 'masters', you are now as free as I am, and if those that claim to be your superiors do not know that you are free, take the sword and bayonet and teach them that you are; for God created all men free, giving to each the same rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

M

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The magnificence of the courage and fortitude of the Korean people defies description. They have chosen to risk death rather than slavery. ~ Douglas MacArthur
Man is not free to watch impassively the enslavement and dishonor of men, nor their struggles for liberty and honor. ~ José Martí
  • Man is not free to watch impassively the enslavement and dishonor of men, nor their struggles for liberty and honor.
  • The tragedy of Korea is further heightened by the fact that its military action is confined to its territorial limits. It condemns that nation, which it is our purpose to save, to suffer the devastating impact of full naval and air bombardment while the enemy's sanctuaries are fully protected from such attack and devastation. Of the nations of the world, Korea alone, up to now, is the sole one which has risked its all against communism. The magnificence of the courage and fortitude of the Korean people defies description. They have chosen to risk death rather than slavery. Their last words to me were: 'Don't scuttle the Pacific!'
  • Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the National character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.
  • The United States, having been the first to abolish within the extent of their authority the transportation of the natives of Africa into slavery, by prohibiting the introduction of slaves and by punishing their citizens participating in the traffic, cannot but be gratified at the progress made by concurrent efforts of other nations toward a general suppression of so great an evil.
  • I have long thought that our vacant territory was the resource which, in some mode or other, was most applicable and adequate as a gradual cure for the portentous evil.
  • States are much at variance in the civic character giving to free persons of colour; those of most of the States, not excepting such as have abolished slavery, imposing various disqualifications, which degrade them from the rank and rights of white persons. All these perplexities develop more and more the dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade.
  • If I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing, but collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I'd be rich beyond dreams. Now, when you see this, and then you stop and consider the wages that were kept back from millions of Black people, not for one year but for 310 years, you'll see how this country got so rich so fast. And what made the economy as strong as it is today. And all that slave labor that was amassed in unpaid wages, is due someone today. And you're not giving us anything when we say that it's time to collect.
    • Malcolm X, "Twenty million black people in prison," in Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, p. 51
  • I say, Archbishop, what do you think I'd have done about this slavery business, if I'd had my own way? I'd have done nothing at all! I'd have left it all alone. It's all a pack of nonsense! Always have been slaves in all the most civilised countries; the Greeks and Romans had slaves; however, they would have their fancy, and so we've abolished slavery; but it's a great folly.
    • Lord Melbourne to Richard Whately, quoted in E. Jane Whately (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Richard Whately, D.D. Late Archbishop of Dublin. Volume II (1866), pp. 451-52
  • As Sarah Hanley has noted, “The maxim 'there are no slaves in France' supported the legal cases of enslaved African women and men who were brought from the colonies into France, filed suits of freedom in French courts, and won.” Hanley 1997, 45. Within the framework of gender studies, Pateman has argued that “most liberal theories would with to argue that there is one relationship, at least, to which consent ought not to be given. A person ought never to consent to be a slave, because this totally negates the individual's freedom and equality and hence, in a self contradiction, denies that the individual is capable of consent.” Pateman 1980, 162-163.
  • Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world … a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.
    • Mississippi Declaration of Secession [1]
  • Execrable son! so to aspire
    Above his brethren, to himself assuming
    Authority usurp'd, from God not given.
    He gave us only over beast, fish, fowl,
    Dominion absolute; that right we hold
    By his donation; but man over men
    He made not lord; such title to himself
    Reserving, human left from human free.
  • The abolition of slavery and serfdom is to be attributed neither to the teachings of theologians and moralists nor to weakness or generosity on the part of the masters. There were among the teachers of religion and ethics as many eloquent defenders of bondage as opponents. Servile labor disappeared because it could not stand the competition of free labor; its unprofitability sealed its doom in the market economy.
  • If one treats men like cattle, one cannot squeeze out of them more than cattle-like performances. But it then becomes significant that man is physically weaker thanoxen and horses, and that feeding and guarding a slave is, in proportion to theperformance to be reaped, more expensive than feeding and guarding cattle. When treated as a chattel, man renders a smaller yield per unit of cost expended forcurrent sustenance and guarding than domestic animals. If one asks from an unfreelaborer human performances, one must provide him with specifically humaninducements. If the employer aims at obtaining products which in quality andquantity excel those whose production can be extorted by the whip, he must interestthe toiler in the yield of his contribution. Instead of punishing laziness and sloth, he must reward diligence, skill, and eagerness. But whatever he may try in thisrespect, he will never obtain from a bonded worker, i.e., a worker who does notreap the full market price of his contribution, a performance equal to that renderedby a freeman, i.e., a man hired on the unhampered labor market. The upper limitbeyond which it is impossible to lift the quality and quantity of the products andservices rendered by slave and serf labor is far below the standards of free labor.In the production of articles of superior quality an enterprise employing theapparently cheap labor of unfree workers can never stand the competition ofenterprises employing free labor. It is this fact that has made all systems ofcompulsory labor disappear.
  • The state of slavery is in its own nature bad. It is neither useful to the master nor to the slave; not to the slave, because he can do nothing through a motive of virtue; nor to the master, because by having an unlimited authority over his slaves he insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and thence becomes fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel.
    • Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book 15, Chapter 1
  • The Minstrel fell!—but the foeman's chain
    Could not bring that proud soul under; The harp he lov'd ne'er spoke again,
    For he tore its chords asunder;
    And said, "No chains shall sully thee,
    Thou soul of love and bravery!
    Thy songs were made for the pure and free,
    They shall never sound in slavery."
  • Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens, and let them vote. Are they property? Why, then, is no other property included? The Houses in this city are worth more than all the wretched slaves which cover the rice swamps of South Carolina.
  • Allah's Apostle said, "You should listen to and obey, your ruler even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin."
  • The Prophet said, "He who has a slave-girl and teaches her good manners and improves her education and then manumits and marries her, will get a double reward; and any slave who observes Allah's right and his master's right will get a double reward."
    • Muhammad narrated Abu Musa Al-Ashari, in Bukhari, Volume 3, Book 46, Number 723
  • In his discussion on slavery Aristotle said that when the shuttle wove by itself and the plectrum played by itself chief workmen would not need helpers nor masters slaves. At the time he wrote, he believed that he was establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today he was in reality justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is true, is the constant form of man's interaction with his environment, if by work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to maintain life; and the lack of work usually means an impairment of function and a breakdown in organic relationship that leads to substitute forms of work, such as invalidism and neurosis. But work in the form of unwilling drudgery or of that sedentary routine which... the Athenians so properly despised—work in these forms is the true province of machines. Instead of reducing human beings to work-mechanisms, we can now transfer the main part of burden to automatic machines. This potentially... is perhaps the largest justification of the mechanical developments of the last thousand years.

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  • If the trade is at present carried on to the same extent and nearly in the same manner, while we are delaying from year to year to put a stop to our part in it, the blood of many thousands of our helpless, much injured fellow creatures is crying against us. The pitiable state of the survivors who are torn from their relatives, connections, and their native land must be taken into account. I fear the African trade is a national sin, for the enormities which accompany it are now generally known; and though, perhaps, the greater part of the nation would be pleased if it were suppressed, yet, as it does not immediately affect their own interest, they are passive. {...] Can we wonder that the calamities of the present war begin to be felt at home, when we ourselves wilfully and deliberately inflict much greater calamities upon the native Africans, who never offended us?. "Woe unto thee that spoilest, and thou wast not spoiled when thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled.
    • John Newton (1797), former slave-trader who later became an abolitionist. . Alluding to the biblical verse in Isaiah 33:1. As quoted in The Works of the Rev. John Newton... to which are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life (1839), Vol. 2, U. Hunt., page 438
  • I should be inexcusable, considering the share I have formerly had in that unhappy business, if, upon this occasion, I should omit to mention the African slave-trade. I do not rank this amongst our national sins, because I hope, and believe, a very great majority of the nation earnestly long for its suppression. But, hitherto, petty and partial interest prevail against the voice of justice, humanity and truth. This enormity, however, is not sufficiently laid to heart. If you are justly shocked by what you hear of the cruelties practised in France, you would, perhaps, be shocked much more, if you could fully conceive of the evils and miseries inseparable from this traffic, which I apprehend, not from hearsay, but from my own observation, are equal in atrocity, and, perhaps superior in number, in the course of a single year, to any or all the worst actions which have been known in France since the commencement of their revolution. There is a cry of blood against us; a cry accumulated by the accession of fresh victims, of thousands, of scores of thousands, I had almost said of hundreds of thousands, from year to year.
    • John Newton (1797), former slave-trader who later became an abolitionist. As quoted in The Works of the Rev. John Newton... to which are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life (1839), Vol. 2, U. Hunt, pages 429-230.
  • The leaders and scholars of Jesus’ time had first enslaved themselves to the law. This not only enhanced their prestige in society, it also gave them a sense of security. Man fears the responsibility of being free. It is often easier to let others make the decisions or to rely upon the letter of the law. Some men want to be slaves. After enslaving themselves to the letter of the law, such men always go on to deny freedom to others. They will not rest until they have imposed the same oppressive burdens upon everyone (Matt 23:4,15).
  • The speculation that the slaves did not reproduce themselves has been most strongly urged by Adolphe Landry, “La Depopulation dans l’antiquite’” Revue historique 177 (1936), 1, 5. A modern sociologist speculates in much the same way, with a little hard evidence, that slave conditions in the American South led to an aversion to childbearing and to careless killing of infants by parents who had not desired them (Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, New York, 1941, p. 103).
    On the other hand, in the somewhat more humane conditions of the Old South, the American negro population increased considerably over the number brought in by the slave trade (Robert R. Kuczynski, Population Movements, Oxford, 1936), pp. 6-7; Marcel R Reinhard, Histore de la population mondile de 1700 a 1948, Paris 1949, p. 346). There is no law that slave populations must decrease. On the liberal manumission policy and on the large number of children of slaves who had become free men, see Tenney Frank, “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire,” American Historical Review 21, (1911), 698-699. The laws Aelia sentia and Fufia Caninia appear in gaius. Institutes 1.18, 42-47, in vol. II of Foontes iuris romani anteiustiniani, ed. Salvatore Riccobono et al. (Florence, 1941-1943), hereafter cited as FIRA. As far as the slave owners were concerned, it is argued by Landry that slave pregnancy meant interruption of work, and because of particularly inadequate care, infant mortality among slaves must have been even higher than the high general rate. Moreover, child-raising meant expense. Thus, if the slaves were easily obtainable by conquest, economic considerations were against breeding them as a deliberate business. On the other hand a healthy slave child was a valuable possession, outweighing the cost in underemployment of his mother, and the Lex Aquilia recognized his value by giving the owner a right to damages if he were injured (Digest 9.2). One small piece of evidence on slaveowner attitudes in a period late in the Empire when Rome was very weak is a sermon of Caesarius of Arles. He suggests that a slaveowner would be shocked at her slaves’ using contraceptives (Sermons 44.2, CC 103:196).

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When a man, desperate for work, finds himself in a factory or on a fishing boat or in a field, working, toiling, for little or no pay, and beaten if he tries to escape — that is slavery. When a woman is locked in a sweatshop, or trapped in a home as a domestic servant, alone and abused and incapable of leaving — that’s slavery. When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery. When a little girl is sold by her impoverished family ... runs away from home, or is lured by the false promises of a better life, and then imprisoned in a brothel and tortured if she resists — that’s slavery. It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world. ~ Barack Obama
  • It ought to concern every person, because it is a debasement of our common humanity. It ought to concern every community, because it tears at our social fabric. It ought to concern every business, because it distorts markets. It ought to concern every nation, because it endangers public health and fuels violence and organized crime. I’m talking about the injustice, the outrage, of human trafficking, which must be called by its true name — modern slavery.
  • When a man, desperate for work, finds himself in a factory or on a fishing boat or in a field, working, toiling, for little or no pay, and beaten if he tries to escape — that is slavery. When a woman is locked in a sweatshop, or trapped in a home as a domestic servant, alone and abused and incapable of leaving — that’s slavery. When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery. When a little girl is sold by her impoverished family — girls my daughters’ age — runs away from home, or is lured by the false promises of a better life, and then imprisoned in a brothel and tortured if she resists — that’s slavery. It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world.

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Slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. ~ Thomas Paine
To Americans, that some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable. ~ Thomas Paine
In America, the Democratic Party thinks slavery is 'indispensable to good government', and is 'the normal condition of one seventh part of the people'. ~ Theodore Parker
  • The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.
    • Thomas Paine, "Dissertation on First Principles of Government" (1795), republished in Moncure D. Conway, ed., The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 3 (1895), p. 267.
  • If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.
  • Slavery usually engenders an interesting discussion because it’s a highly emotive conflict—people have a hard time feeling neutral about it.
  • I have never been in favor of the abolition of slavery until since this war has determined me in the conviction that it is a greater sin than our Government is able to stand... It is opposed to the Spirit of the age, and in my opinion this Rebellion is but the death struggle of the overgrown monster.
    • Eli K. Pickett, United States Army sergeant, in a letter to his wife (27 March 1863)
  • War is bad, heaven knows, but slavery is far worse. If the doom of slavery is not sealed by the war, I shall curse the day I entered the Army.
  • Poor Daniel was lame in the hip, and could not keep up with the rest of the slaves; and our master would order him to be stripped and laid down on the ground, and have him beaten with a rod of rough briar till his skin was quite red and raw... This poor man's wounds were never healed and I have often seen them full of maggots…He was an object of pity and terror to the whole gang of slaves, and in his wretched case we saw, each of us, our own lot, if we should live to be as old."

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We love freedom more, vastly more, than slavery. Consequently, we hope to keep clear of the Democrats! ~ Joseph Hayne Rainey
For the prime design of society is the extension of the operation of law, and the equal treatment and protection of the citizens. Slavery, therefore, being the negation of law, cannot arise from law, or be compatible with it. As far as slavery prevails in any community, so far must that community be defective in answering the purposes of society. ~ Rev. James Ramsay
Slavery is an unnatural state of opression on the one side, and of suffering on the other; and needs only to be laid open or exposed in its native colours, to command the abhorrence and opposition of every man of feeling and sentiment. ~ Rev. James Ramsay
Although they may be poor, not a man shall be a slave. ~ George Frederick Root
  • If the Negroes, numbering one-eighth of the population of these United States, would only cast their votes in the interest of the Democratic Party, all open measures against them would be immediately suspended and their rights as American citizens recognized. But as to the real results of such a state of affairs, and speaking in behalf of those with whom I am conversant, I can only say that we love freedom more, vastly more, than slavery. Consequently, we hope to keep clear of the Democrats! I say to the entire membership of the Democratic Party, that upon your hands rests the blood of the loyal men of the south. Disclaim it as you will; the stain is there to prove your criminality before God and the world in the day of retribution.
  • For the prime design of society is the extension of the operation of law, and the equal treatment and protection of the citizens. Slavery, therefore, being the negation of law, cannot arise from law, or be compatible with it. As far as slavery prevails in any community, so far must that community be defective in answering the purposes of society. And this we affirm to be in the highest degree the case of our colonies. Slavery, indeed, in the manner wherein it is found there, is an unnatural state of opression on the one side, and of suffering on the other; and needs only to be laid open or exposed in its native colours, to command the abhorrence and opposition of every man of feeling and sentiment.
    • Rev. James Ramsay, Anglican priest and leading abolitionist. An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784), p. 16
  • While the rest of the western world followed an historic trajectory dedicated to abolishing slavery and bringing an expanded meaning to the concepts of human rights and participatory democracy, the south marched off in an opposite direction. The Confederacy was a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal, and that the government's job is to preserve and ensure that inequality.
  • It is utterly impossible for us, as finite beings, with the utmost stretch of the imagination, to conceive the depth and immensity of the horrors of slavery.
  • Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them: they love their servitude, as the comrades of Ulysses loved their brutish condition. If then there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves, and their cowardice perpetuated the condition.
  • Now, a man who becomes the slave of another does not give himself; he sells himself, at the least for his subsistence: but for what does a people sell itself? A king is so far from furnishing his subjects with their subsistence that he gets his own only from them; and, according to Rabelais, kings do not live on nothing. Do subjects then give their persons on condition that the king takes their goods also? I fail to see what they have left to preserve.
  • The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right which does not exist. No one has a right to kill an enemy except when he cannot make him a slave, and the right to enslave him cannot therefore be derived from the right to kill him. It is accordingly an unfair exchange to make him buy at the price of his liberty his life, over which the victor holds no right. Is it not clear that there is a vicious circle in founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death?
  • From whatever aspect we regard the question, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as being illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: “I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.”
    • Ibid, I, Ch. 4
  • Grotius and the rest find in war another origin for the so-called right of slavery. The victor having, as they hold, the right of killing the vanquished, the latter can buy back his life at the price of his liberty; and this convention is the more legitimate because it is to the advantage of both parties. But it is clear that this supposed right to kill the conquered is by no means deducible from the state of war.
    • Ibid, I, Ch. 4

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Our great and necessary domestic institution of slavery shall be preserved! ~ Southern Punch
There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty. Fanaticism is excessive zeal. There may be, and have been fanatics in false religion; in the bloody religions of the heathen. There are fanatics in superstition. But there can be no fanatic, however warm their zeal, in the true religion, even although you sell your goods and bestow your money on the poor, and go on and follow your Master. There may, and every hour shows around me, fanatics in the cause of false liberty – that infamous liberty which justifies human bondage, that liberty whose 'corner-stone is slavery'. ~ Thaddeus Stevens
What had been drapetomania became depression. ... Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery. ~ Thomas Szasz
  • What we’ve been hearing from the panelists is how the global food system works right now... It’s based on a radical denial of the economic rights of poor people... We’ve just heard from the Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many point a finger of blame at the DRC and other poor countries for their poverty. Yet we don’t seem to remember, or want to remember, that starting around 1870, King Leopold of Belgium created a slave colony in the Congo that lasted for around 40 years; and then the government of Belgium ran the colony for another 50 years. In 1961, after independence of the DRC, the CIA then assassinated the DRC’s first popular leader, Patrice Lumumba, and installed a US-backed dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, for roughly the next 30 years. And in recent years, Glencore and other multinational companies suck out the DRC’s cobalt without paying a level of royalties and taxes. We simply don’t reflect on the real history of the DRC and other poor countries struggling to escape from poverty. Instead, we point fingers at these countries and say, “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you govern yourselves properly?”
  • You have among you many a purchas'd slave,
    Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,
    You use in abject and in slavish parts,
    Because you bought them.
  • Vis tu cogitare istum, quem servum tuum vocas, ex isdem seminibus ortum eodem frui caelo, aeque spirare, aeque vivere, aeque mori!
  • 'The people of the South', says a contemporary, 'are not fighting for slavery but for independence'. Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy, a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland... Our doctrine is this. WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the ground work.
  • Slavery originated in force, by the stronger against the weaker party, and not by natural right; that it is maintained and upheld by oppression and wrong, and against the law of nature. This usurped ownership in man is not that kind of property which is recognized by the general consent of mankind. The advanced state of civilized society does not recognize the right of one man to own another man against his will. The inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is conceded to all. The right of every man to himself, to enjoy the fruits of his own ingenuity and industry, are among the natural rights of every person made in the image of God.
  • If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune. No doubt there are usually more and sharper quarrels between parents and children, than between masters and slaves; yet it advances not the art of household management to change a father's right into a right of property, and count children but as slaves. Slavery, then, and not peace, is furthered by handing, over the whole authority to one man.
  • It remains to point out the advantage of a knowledge of this doctrine as bearing on conduct, and this may be easily gathered from what has been said. The doctrine is good, (1) Inasmuch as it teaches us solely according to the decree of God, and to be partakers of the Divine nature, and so much the more, as we perform more perfect actions and more and more understand God. Such a doctrine not only completely tranquilizes our spirit, but also shows us where our highest happiness or blessedness is, namely, solely in the knowledge of God, whereby we are led to act only as love and piety shall bid us. We may thus clearly understand, how far astray from a true estimate of virtue are those who expect to be decorated by God with high rewards for their virtue, and their best actions, as for having endured the direct slavery; as if virtue and the service of God were not in itself happiness and perfect freedom. (2) Inasmuch as it teaches us, how we ought to conduct ourselves with respect to the gifts of fortune, or matters which are not in our power, and do not follow from our nature. For it shows us that we should await and endure fortune's smiles or frowns with an equal mind, seeing that all things follow from the eternal decree of God by the same necessity... (3) This doctrine raises social life, inasmuch as it teaches us to hate no man, neither to despise, to deride, to envy, or to be angry with any. Further, as it tells us that each should be content with his own, and helpful to his neighbor, not from any womanish pity, favor, or superstition, but solely from the guide of reason, according as the time and occasion demand... (4) Lastly, this doctrine confers no small advantage on the commonwealth; for it teaches how citizens should be governed and lead, not so as to become slaves, but so that they may freely do whatsoever things are best.
  • I can never acknowledge the right of slavery. I will bow down to no deity however worshipped by professing Christians — however dignified by the name of the Goddess of Liberty, whose footstool is the crushed necks of the groaning millions, and who rejoices in the resoundings of the tyrant's lash, and the cries of his tortured victims.
    • Thaddeus Stevens, letter (4 May 1838), quoted in Shapers of the Great Debate on the Civil War : A Biographical Dictionary (2005) by Dan Monroe and Bruce Tap, p. 255
  • There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty. Fanaticism is excessive zeal. There may be, and have been fanatics in false religion; in the bloody religions of the heathen. There are fanatics in superstition. But there can be no fanatic, however warm their zeal, in the true religion, even although you sell your goods and bestow your money on the poor, and go on and follow your Master. There may, and every hour shows around me, fanatics in the cause of false liberty – that infamous liberty which justifies human bondage, that liberty whose 'corner-stone is slavery'. But there can be no fanaticism however high the enthusiasm, in the cause of rational, universal liberty – the liberty of the Declaration of Independence.
  • Torture was necessary to maintain slavery. It was integral to slavery. You cannot have slavery without some torture or the threat of torture; and you cannot have torture without slavery. You cannot imprison a free man for ever unless you have broken him; and you can only forcibly break a man's soul by torturing it out of him. Slavery dehumanizes; torture dehumanizes in exactly the same way. The torture of human beings who have no freedom and no recourse to the courts is slavery.
  • The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words.
  • What had been drapetomania became depression. ... Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.
    • Thomas Szasz, "The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 346

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[A]ccording to Graeber, slavery as a concept was widely looked down upon across Europe prior to the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade; the church opposed it; and by the time Portuguese and Dutch merchants found the opportunity to kick-start a modern human slave trade on the western coast of the continent of Africa, slavery proper had otherwise vanished from European culture, save the persistence of wage labor and indentured servitude, often indistinguishable from more explicit forms of slavery (Graeber, 250, 346). ~ Ryan Tracy
Human trafficking is a form of modern slavery. ~ Donald Trump
[P]erfectly irreconcilable a state of slavery is to the principles of a democracy, which form the basis and foundation of our government. ~ St. George Tucker
  • I am a poor, ignorant man . . . but I have heard of the Declaration of Independence, and have read the Bible. The Declaration says all men are created equal, and the Bible says God has made us all of one blood. I think ... we are entitled to good treatment, that it is wrong to hold men in slavery.
    • Arthur Tappan, an elderly black man who spoke at the New York City Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. As quoted by Stern, Joseph (1941), Science & Society, Vol 5, p. 168. See also Ottley, Roi (1948), Inside Black America, p. 14.
    • The quotation "God has made us all of one blood." is a reference to the New Testament Book Acts of the Apostles where Paul of Tarsus says about God: "And [he] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring." (Acts, 17:26-28 King James Version) The one blood is Adam and Eve, for "God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." (Genesis, 1-27 New International Version)
    • According to the New International Version the poets in this bible passage "From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’" (Acts, 17:26-28 New International Version) are the Cretan philosopher Epimenides and the Cilician Stoic philosopher Aratus.
  • The men and women who created this first great sugar boom in the world lived well. Many stories are told of the opulence of the planters in old Brazil, their tables laden with silver and fine china bought from captains on their way back from the East, doors with gold locks, women wearing huge precious stones, musicians enlivening the banquets, beds covered with damask; and an army of slaves of many colours always hovering.
  • The foundation of American economic prosperity rested on the labor of four to five million black slaves. In fact, the suffering inflicted on Native and Black Americans has not remained confined to those two races, but has become part of the collective American painbody. It is always the case that both victim and perpetrator suffer the consequences of any acts of violence, oppression, or brutality. For what you do to others, you do to yourself.
  • As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence — as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.
  • It is not within the limits of this thesis to fully account for how much of the preoccupation with slavery that came to dominate European thought was directly tied to reflection on and opposition to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and how much was residual from the common knowledge that the history of Western civilization was (and is still) largely a history of enslavement. However, according to Graeber, slavery as a concept was widely looked down upon across Europe prior to the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade; the church opposed it; and by the time Portuguese and Dutch merchants found the opportunity to kick-start a modern human slave trade on the western coast of the continent of Africa, slavery proper had otherwise vanished from European culture, save the persistence of wage labor and indentured servitude, often indistinguishable from more explicit forms of slavery (Graeber, 250, 346). There was also opposition to the enslavement of Africans, resulting in the prohibition of slavery within certain European national borders. But we can at least see that anxieties about the enslavement of the modern self were grounded in material realities. If one could not pay one‟s debts, one could be rounded up and shipped off to the New World in indentured servitude (Graeber, 2011). An enslaved man was a man who was “dead to world.” Lost to society.
  • I…took the little sufferer in my lap. I observed a general titter among the white members of the family…The youngest of the family, a little girl about the age of the young slave, after gazing at me for a few moments in utter astonishment, exclaimed: 'My! If Mrs. Trollope has not taken her in her lap, and wiped her nasty mouth! Why I would not have touched her mouth for two hundred dollars'…The idea of really sympathising in the sufferings of a slave appeared to them as absurd as weeping over a calf that had been slaughtered by the butcher."
  • Human trafficking is a form of modern slavery. Throughout the United States and around the world, human trafficking tears apart communities, fuels criminal activity, and threatens the national security of the United States. It is estimated that millions of individuals are trafficked around the world each year — including into and within the United States. As the United States continues to lead the global fight against human trafficking, we must remain relentless in resolving to eradicate it in our cities, suburbs, rural communities, tribal lands, and on our transportation networks. Human trafficking in the United States takes many forms and can involve exploitation of both adults and children for labor and sex.
  • I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
  • Civil rights, as we may remember, are reducible to three primary heads; the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property. In a state of slavery, the two last are wholly abolished, the person of the slave being at the absolute disposal of his master; and property, what he is incapable, in that state, either of acquiring, or holding, in his own use. Hence, it will appear how perfectly irreconcilable a state of slavery is to the principles of a democracy, which form the basis and foundation of our government.

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The law of nations knows of no distinction of color, and if an enemy of the United States should enslave and sell any captured persons of their army, it would be a case for the severest retaliation, if not redressed upon complaint. ~ United States Department of War

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In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. ~ Booker T. Washington
Of all forms of slavery there is none that is so harmful and degrading as that form of slavery which tempts one human being to hate another by reason of his race or color. ~ Booker T. Washington
Louisiana looks to the formation of a southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery. ~ George Williamson
Nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle. ~ George Washington
When it became clear that slavery was not going away by itself, Americans faced a choice. They could keep their slaves and reject their founding principles. Or they could affirm their principles and limit the growth of slavery. ~ Thomas G. West
  • In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists.
    • Booker T. Washington, An Address on Abraham Lincoln before the Republican Club of New York City (12 February 1909)
  • A healthy man owes to the sick all that he can do for them. An educated man owes to the ignorant all that he can do for them. A free man owes to the world’s slaves all that he can do for them. And what is to be done is more, much more, than good works, Christmas baskets, bonuses and tips and bread and circuses. There is only one thing to be done with slaves… free them.
  • Are you a man? Then you should have a human heart. But have you indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as compassion there? Do you never feel another's pain? Have you no sympathy? No sense of human woe? No pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow-creatures, was you a stone, or a brute? Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonizing creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Did not one tear drop from your eye, one sigh escape from your breast? Do you feel no relenting now? If you do not, you must go on, till the measure of your iniquities is full. Then will the great God deal with you, as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands. And at that day it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than for you!
    • John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774), quoted in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley: Volume X (1827), p. 503
  • I would do anything that is in my power toward the extirpation of that trade which is a scandal not only to Christianity but humanity.
    • John Wesley, letter to Henry Moore (14 March 1790), quoted in John Telford (ed.), The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M. Vol. VIII: July 24, 1787, to February 24, 1791 (1960), p. 207
  • When it became clear that slavery was not going away by itself, Americans faced a choice. They could keep their slaves and reject their founding principles. Or they could affirm their principles and limit the growth of slavery, placing it, in Lincoln's words, 'in the course of ultimate extinction'.
  • The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People recognizes in "Song of the South" remarkable artistic merit in the music and in the combination of living actors and the cartoon technique. It regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the north or south, the production helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, "Song of the South" unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts.
    • Walter Francis White, as quoted in Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America (1997) by Karl F. Cohen
  • Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization? Is it not plain that she must suffer from it; that civilization must be checked; that her barbarous manners must be made more barbarous; and that the happiness of her millions of inhabitants must be prejudiced with her intercourse with Britain? Does not every one see that a slave trade carried on around her coasts must carry violence and desolation to her very center?
  • The true way to virtue is by withdrawing from temptation; let us then withdraw from these wretched Africans those temptations to fraud, violence, cruelty, and injustice, which the slave trade furnishes. Wherever the sun shines, let us go round the world with him, diffusing our benevolence; but let us not traffic, only that we may set kings against their subjects, subjects against their kings, sowing discord in every village, fear and terror in every family, setting millions of our fellow creatures a-hunting each other for slaves, creating fairs and markets for human flesh through one whole continent of the world, and, under the name of policy, concealing from ourselves all the baseness and iniquity of such a traffic
  • The willingness of Africans to participate in the slave trade in Africa allowed it to flourish. Africans delivered fellow Africans into the clutches of European subjugation and servitude, something the mosquito made impossible for Europeans to do themselves. The mosquito would not allow Europeans to pluck Africans from their homelands. Without African slavery, New World mercantilist plantation economics would have failed, quinine would not have been discovered, and Africa would have remained African. The entire Columbian Exchange would have been vastly different, or perhaps not have occurred at all.
    As it was, however, the Portuguese, and eventually the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans, were able to tap into the existing internal African slave culture that revolved around captives of war. Africans initially sold their captives to the Portuguese, and small, localized slave trade emerged. Originally, it generally operated under the cultural umbrella of customary and conventional African slavery. By exploiting this traditional feuding among African nations and social networks, Europeans were able to introduce a vastly different form of captive slavery, one of bulk commercial export. African leaders and monarchs began raiding traditional enemies and allies alike, solely for the purpose of capturing slaves to sell at a growing number of slave forts on the coast, operated by an increasingly broad range of European nationalities. The European demand was met by an African supply of African slaves.
  • I’m feeling honored that I am being chosen as a Nobel laureate and I have been honored with this – this precious award, the Nobel Peace Prize. And I’m proud that I’m the first Pakistani and the first young woman or the first young person who is getting this award. It’s a great honor for me. And I’m also really happy that I’m sharing this award with a person – with a person from India whose name is Kailash Satyarthi and his great work for child’s right, his great work against – against child slavery.

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

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  • But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.
    • Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Holmes, April 22, 1820.—The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, vol. 10, p. 157 (1899). Jefferson refers to the Missouri question, whether to admit Missouri as a slave state but prohibit slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. Holmes was a representative from Massachusetts from 1817 to March 15, 1820, when he resigned to attend the Maine constitutional convention. He was elected to the Senate from Maine and served from June 13, 1820, to 1827, and 1829–1833.
  • Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.
    • Abraham Lincoln, annual message to Congress, December 1, 1862; in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 5, p. 537
  • I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone.
    • Abraham Lincoln, fourth debate with Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858; in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 3, p. 146. Lincoln used similar wording in a speech in Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857: "Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone".—Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 405 (1953)
  • Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it comes from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro.
    • Abraham Lincoln, speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858; in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 2, p. 500
  • Whenever [I] hear any one, arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
    • President Abraham Lincoln, speech to 140th Indiana regiment, March 17, 1865; in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 8, p. 361
  • All socialism involves slavery…. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy another's desires.
    • Herbert Spencer, "The Coming Slavery", The Contemporary Review, April 1884, p. 474. This essay was reprinted in chapter 2 of his book, Man vs. the State (1884)
  • Not only do I pray for it, on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly forsee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.
    • Attributed to George Washington, in Retrospections of America, 1797–1811 (1887) by John Bernard, p. 91; this is from Bernard's account of a conversation he had with Washington in 1798, but it is reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)
  • In returning I read a very different book, published by an honest Quaker, on that execrable sum of all villanies, commonly called the Slave-trade.
  • Like a light-skinned slave boy, we're in the motherfucking house!
  • The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery...
    • John T. Wightman, The Glory of God, the Defence of the South (1861), Yorkville, South Carolina
  • Louisiana looks to the formation of a southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery...
    • George Williamson, speech to the Texan secession convention (March 1861), as quoted in Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas (1861), by E.W. Winkler, Texas

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 715-16.
  • Servi peregrini, ut primum Galliæ fines penetraverint eodem momento liberi sunt.
    • Foreign slaves, as soon as they come within the limits of Gaul, that moment they are free.
    • Bodinus, Book I, Chapter V
  • Lord Mansfield first established the grand doctrine that the air of England is too pure to be breathed by a slave.
  • No more slave States and no more slave territory.
    • Salmon P. Chase, Resolutions Adopted at the Free-Soil National Convention (9 August 1848)
  • Cotton is King; or Slavery in the Light of Political Economy.
    • David Christy, title of book (pub. 1855), the phrase "Cotton is King" was later used by James H. Hammond in the US Senate in March, 1858, and Gov. Manning of South Carolina, in a speech at Columbia, S. C. (1858)
  • It [Chinese Labour in South Africa] could not, in the opinion of His Majesty's Government, be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.
  • Nimia libertas et populis et privatis in nimiam servitutem cadit.
    • Excessive liberty leads both nations and individuals into excessive slavery.
    • Cicero, De Republica, I. 44
  • Fit in dominatu servitus, in servitute dominatus.
    • He is sometimes slave who should be master; and sometimes master who should be slave.
    • Cicero, Oratio Pro Rege Deiotaro, XI
  • Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves.
  • Resolved, That the compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell; involving both parties in atrocious criminality, and should be immediately annulled.
  • The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.
  • The very mudsills of society. * * * We call them slaves. * * * But I will not characterize that class at the North with that term; but you have it. It is there, it is everywhere, it is eternal.
  • Whatever day
    Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book XVII, line 392. Pope's translation
  • [England] a soil whose air is deemed too pure for slaves to breathe in.
    • Capel Lofft, Reports, p. 2. Margrave's Argument. (14 May 1772)
  • The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it.
    • Lord Mansfield. Said in the case of a negro, James Somersett, carried from Africa to Jamaica and sold
  • Where bastard Freedom waves
    Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
    • Thomas Moore, To the Lord Viscount Forbes, written from the City of Washington
  • And ne'er shall the sons of Columbia be slaves,
    While the earth bears a plant, or the sea rolls its waves.
  • Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.
  • Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still,
    Slavery! said I—still thou art a bitter draught.
  • By the Law of Slavery, man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a mere chattel.
    • Charles Sumner, The Anti-Slavery Enterprise, address at New York (9 May 1859)
  • Where Slavery is there Liberty cannot be; and where Liberty is there Slavery cannot be.
    • Charles Sumner, Slavery and the Rebellion, speech before the New York Young Men's Republican Union (5 November 1864)
  • They [the blacks] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
    • Roger B. Taney, The Dred Scot Case. See Howard's Rep, Volume XIX, p. 407
  • Slavery is also as ancient as war, and war as human nature.
    • Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique portatif ("A Philosophical Dictionary") (1764), "Slaves"
  • I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel me to do it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.
  • That execrable sum of all villanies commonly called the Slave-trade.
  • A Christian! going, gone!
    Who bids for God's own image?—for his grace,
    Which that poor victim of the market-place
    Hath in her suffering won?
  • Our fellow-countrymen in chains!
    Slaves—in a land of light and law!
    Slaves—crouching on the very plains
    Where rolled the storm of Freedom's war!
  • What! mothers from their children riven!
    What! God's own image bought and sold!
    AMERICANS to market driven,
    And bartered as the brute for gold!

See also

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