Roger B. Taney Quotes

From the U.S. Capitol Building to the White House, our national symbols that represent freedom to so many of us, were built by people who were anything but free.

If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America... that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers and poison the fair fruits of freedom.

It has always been a great wrong that these men and their families should be held in bondage.

I am amazed at the facility with which some men follow in the wake of slavery.

Tell me not of rights; talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves! I deny the right--I acknowledge not the property! The principles, the feelings of our nature, rise in rebellion against it

I know that there is a visionary dogma which holds that negro slaves cannot be the subject of property. I shall not dwell on the speculative abstraction. That IS property which the law declares TO BE property. Two hundred years of legislation have sanctified and sanctioned negro slaves as property.

in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.

I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist.

I haven't run across anyone in Georgia who is not regretful and repentant of man's inhumanity when you talk about owning one another.

It is not a liberty of circumstance, conceded to us alone, that we wish; it is the adoption absolute of the principle that no man, born red, black or white, can be the property of his fellow man.

Why is Slavery so much condemn'd and strove against in one Case, and so highly applauded and held so necessary and so sacred in another?

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.

White people just don't want their slaves to be free. That's the whole thing.

One thing I incorporated in my novel 'The Poe Shadow' was the little-known fact that documents show Poe inherited a slave and decided to free him.

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

In the nineteenth century, slavery was the greatest wrong, and government never stood so tall as when it was redressing that wrong.

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

We do not know how other persons may feel in view of the recent dicta of the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott … but it appears to us that the almost diabolical spirit it evinces in going out of the way to Freedom at the expense of Slavery, ought to be sufficient to arouse to indignation the coolest and most torpid of northern men. The decision is a fitting crown to the aborted tyranny which has just submerged with Pierce; an iron clasp, well forged to link the dead with the living administration. It comes pat upon the recent inaugural, "rounds and caps it to the tyrant's eye" and just fills up the cup of inequity.

No black mankinde may be forced to serve a master for longer than ten years, after which they would be free, as the manner is with English servants.

Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the Northern States it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the Southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process. That it may finally be effected and its progress hastened, will be my last and fondest prayer.

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State [instead of colonizing them]? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

To all whom these presents may come know ye, that I Peter Hawkins a free black man of the city of Richmond having purchased my wife Rose, a slave about twenty-two years of age and by her have had a child called Mary now about 18 months old, for the love I bear toward my wife and child have thought proper to emancipate them and for the further consideration of five shillings to me in hand paid …. I emancipate and set free the said Rose and Mary and relinquish all my right ... as slaves to the said Rose and Mary.

Prior to the Revolution, the great majority, or rather the great body of our people had been so long accustomed to the practice and convenience of having slaves, that very few among them ever doubted the propriety and rectitude of it.