Abraham Lincoln Quotes
[God] largely augmented our free population by emancipation and immigration.
Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL), Proclamation making Thanksgiving Day a national holiday
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
His family was one of the wealthiest in Rhode Island. He called in the entire family and he formally read the deed. The family itself had actually been active in the slave trade under John, his oldest brother, so this deed was very shocking to them. Moses became a leading abolitionist in Rhode Island and John the major defender of slavery in the state. Despite that, the brothers actually remained close.
In early New England the General Court served as both a legislature and a judiciary before separation of powers was introduced. 5 years later the Court banned importing African slaves at all. While slavery was not common in Rhode Island, the laws was not seriously enforced on those who would defy them. It does represent a public anti-slavery sentiment that existed in Early America. It would take 200 years for Rhode Island to finally eliminate all forms of slavery.
It was not uncommon for free Blacks to purchase slaves, marry them and set them free.
Baldwin was a young lawyer at the time. He represented a shipload of ex-slaves who had taken over their Spanish slave ship and landed in America. The Spanish claimed, the ship owners and some of the crew all claimed the “property.”
Fitzhugh was a Southern iconoclast whose view of Northern labor was much like that of Karl Marx but who was an enthusiastic supporter of slavery. Fitzhugh was of the opinion that slavery would be reinstated in the North and his treatise agues for that. More and more intellectual opinion was coming to the conclusion that slavery must be abolished or made universal before Lincoln’s famous statement in his debate against Douglas. Although Northerners and Southerners had come to agree on this point, they disagreed about which alternative would and should prevail.
The organization was named for James Bruce—Lord Elgin, the Governor-General of Canada who was very favorably disposed towards Blacks colonists. When a slave reached Canada, he or she was automatically free under Canadian law, and Canada was the preferred destination of many runaway slaves. The Elgin Association was best know for the founding of Buxton—See {590063}.
The French were at the time considered the major barrier to growth and development of the colonies.
This quotation illustrates the strong abolitionist tendency in the Ohio Territory. Under this clause, escaped slaves from Southern states would not be returned by the state authorities. Even more insulting to the slave enthusiasts of the South, if a Southerner brought any slaves into Ohio with them as was common for Southerners traveling with their personal slaves or horse team drivers, those slaves would be free. An interesting aspect of this clause of the Ohio Constitution was that the beginning was, word for word, copied from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. See {618100}.
A few years later he had a clearer idea of what was to be done. However, the additional factor of the Civil War played a big part in driving his Emancipation Proclamation. See {609360}
Parker and other escaped slaves in Christiana fought off slave catchers and killed the slave owner leading them. Charged with treason, he escaped to Canada with his family and lived there the rest of his life. While not a polished writer, after he himself had escaped and went to Christiana and leaned to read and write. He wrote this narrative of his life as a slave—one of the few written works we have from slaves.
As an entertainer she had toured much of the world and seen American slavery and that of some other nations. She became a staunch abolitionist and like entertainers in the 20th and 21st centuries she used her celebrity to give anti-slavery lectures and perform for audiences where she donated the proceeds of the event to the abolition cause. She is a particularly interesting political figure in that she seems to be one of the first entertainers to perform for a social cause and become an activist.
Jefferson was then the United States Minister to France. While in Paris he was offered membership by M. de Warville in the Society for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade. Jefferson felt that he had to decline because his joining would have been seen as a politically polarizing act, inappropriate for an Ambassador of the American government which was divided on the issue of slavery. Some criticize the refusal and argue that this would have been the perfect act to push the abolition perspective, and question Jefferson’s sincerity about slavery as he not only refused to join the society, but never freed his own slaves though it is argued that he never made enough money to afford to emancipate them.
Abraham Lincoln was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.
