William Lloyd Garrison Quotes

One [section of the nation] would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

... the taint of slavery will render the cause of the South loathsome to the civilized world.

The Islamic Arab agenda is the cause of the [civil] war and the cause of the suffering. It is a choice between slavery and freedom. What is life worth to be at peace when you are a slave in your own country? …. The engine which drives the war is injustice.

I will not live in the same country as these insolent Northerners.

A Negro boy, named George Kirk, a slave from Georgia, secreted himself in a vessel commanded by Captain Cuckley, and was brought to New York. Here he was arrested and confined, at the instance of the captain, who is subjected to severe penalties for the abduction of the slave. The claim of the master to have the fugitive sent back to Georgia was tried…. The judge’s decision set the boy free, for want of evidence to prove his identity; and such a mob, of all colours, from dirty white to shining black, came rushing down Nassau and into Beckman Street as made peaceable people shrink into places of security. Such shouting and jostling, such peals of negro triumph, such uncovering of woolly heads in raising the greasy hats to give effect to the loud huzzas of the sons of Africa…. How will it end? How long will the North and the South remain a united people?

We are in the midst of war – war of the most bloody kind – a war of extermination. Freedom and slavery are interlocked in deadly embrace, and death is certain for one or the other party.... A crisis is just before us ... and only God knoweth where it will end.

Every kingdom divided against itself shall be desolated.

There is not an inn between Washington and Montgomery, a distance of over 1000 miles, that will accommodate me to a bed or a meal. Now then, is there a man on this floor who is so heartless, whose breast is so void of better feelings, as to say that this brutal custom needs no regulation. I hold that it does, and Congress is the body to regulate it.

At the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, African slavery existed in twelve of the thirteen States. Slaves are recognized as property, and as a basis of political power, by the Federal Compact, and special provisions are made by that instrument for their protection as property…. the opponents of slavery shall arrest its further expansion, and by Congressional Legislation exclude it from the common Territories of the Federal Government, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction…. Abraham Lincoln--he stands forth as the representative of the fanaticism of the North, which, for the last quarter of a century, has been making war upon the South, her property, her civilization, her institutions and her interests; as the representative of that party which overrides all constitutional barriers, ignores the obligation of official oaths, and acknowledges allegiance to a higher law than the Constitution, striking down sovereignty and equality of the states, and resting its claims to popular favor upon the one dogma—the equality of the races white and black.

Any Union man, travelling in either of these two States [North & South Carolina], must expect to hear many very insulting words; and any Northern man is sure to find his principles despised, his people condemned, and himself subjected to much disagreeable continually. There is everywhere extreme sensitiveness concerning the negro and his relations; and I neither found nor learned of any village, town, or city in which it would be safe for a man to express freely what are here, in the North, called very moderate views on that subject.

The South will be forced to choose between abolition and secession.

The cause that the South fought for was one of the worst for which people ever fought.

The way of mutual strife and exclusiveness is the only way to perdition and slavery.

We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.

What did our nation ever do to provoke these madly vicious enemies? What is seen as injustice in one place is seen as just requital in the other.

North and South were equally confident that God was on their side, and appealed incessantly to Him.

Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous.

Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.

Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.

I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.

Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.

It, sometimes, suits the slaveholders to claim, that their slavery is an exclusively State concern; and that the North has, therefore, nothing to do with it.

The poor North has much to do with slavery. It staggers under its load and smarts under its lash.

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.