Planters Quotes

I have never been able to procure sufficient slaves to cultivate my lands and that of any guilt that attached to this trade we [planters] were at most but partners with the Parliament which tolerated it, and the country which profited so much from it.

The Negroes who came to America directly from Africa in the eighteenth century were strikingly different from those whom generations of servitude later made comparatively docile. They were wild and turbulent in disposition and were likely at any moment to take revenge for the great wrong that had been inflicted upon them. The planters in the South knew this and lived in constant fear of uprisings. When the situation became too threatening, they placed prohibitive duties on importations [of Slaves], and they also sought to keep their slaves in subjection by barbarous and cruel modes of punishment, both crucifixion and burning being legalized in some early codes. On sea as well as on land Negroes frequently rose upon those who held them in bondage, and sometimes they actually won their freedom.

Our hotel was full of legislators and volunteer officers, mostly planters or sons of planters, and almost without exception men of standing and property. South Carolina is an oligarchy in spirit, and allows no plebeians in high places.

Some of them [traders and planters] seem to think that nothing is to be regarded but Gold or Silver. They may at length repent the pains they have taken to teach the Planters to love these tempting metals, for should they ever prefer Gold or Silver to British Manufactures the Cloaths and Household furniture that they are at present fond of and be forced to make such things as they have not money to purchase Britain will reap far less benefit from her Provinces

We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.

Gen. Banks has issued an order for the instruction of Negro children. Schoolhouses are to be built or rented and Teachers hired for this purpose, and the farmers and planters are to pay the Taxes in support of this.

Although Drunkenness be justly termed a vice which the Salvages are ignorant of, yet the benefit is very great that comes to the planters by the sale of strong liquor to the Salvages, who are much taken with the delight of it; for they will pawn their wits, to purchase the acquaintance of it.

Everything works harmoniously now. Even the small planters (Spanish) are giving in their adhesion to the present disposition of affairs, going so far, in some cases, as to send their own children to ask admittance into this school. I have now some half-dozen of the small planters who come to my night-school, where they recite on the same benches with the freedmen. This I consider progress

If the planters carry politics into the fields they will find it bad business.

We could create a Virginia cavalry regiment specifically for the sons of planters, youths whose indolence or education, has unfitted them for foot-service.

On the eve of the Civil War slightly more than four million people of African descent lived in the slave states. About a quarter of a million of those were free people of color. That is more free blacks in the South than they are in the North. They lived on the very margins of southern society because slave holders, planters, feared them as harbingers of the Revolution, beginning of slave insurrections, examples to slaves that a black person could be free. …. Perhaps because blackness was identified with labor, free people of color in the South had certain economic niches which allowed them to participate in the economy, participate perhaps to a far greater degree than free blacks in the North. And free blacks in the South enjoyed a greater economic prosperity than they did in the North which is perhaps one of the reasons why they stayed in the South.