Slaveholders Quotes

The conspiracy is nearly completed. The Legislation of the Republic is in the hands of this handful of Slaveholders. The United States Senate assures it to them. The Executive power of the Government is theirs. Buchanan took the oath of fealty to them on the steps of the Capitol last Wednesday. The body which gives the supreme law of the land, has just acceded to their demands, and dared to declare that under the charter of the Nation, men of African descent are not citizens of the United States and can not be -- that the Ordinance of 1787 was void -- that human Slavery is not a local thing, but pursues its victims to free soil, clings to them wherever they go, and returns with them -- that the American Congress has no power to prevent the enslavement of men in the National Territories -- that the inhabitants themselves of the Territories have no power to exclude human bondage from their midst -- and that men of color can not be suitors for justice in the Courts of the United States!

The slaveholders are terrible for promising to give you this or that, or such and such a privilege, if you will do thus and so, and when the time of fulfillment comes, and one claims the promise, they, forsooth, recollect nothing of the kind; and you are, like as not, taunted with being a liar.

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.

Hitherto, this tyranny of slaveholders over non-slaveholding citizens has been mainly confined to slaveholding communities. But Slavery has of late arrogantly claimed to be national. Congress is sanctioning the usurpation, and the Federal Courts and even State Courts are boldly enforcing it. In violation of the Constitution, Congress compels the non-slaveholders in the free States to capture and deliver the fugitive slave. Congress at its last session was on the eve of subverting the original, honored jurisdiction of State Courts over Federal officers

Men like Abraham Lincoln recognized that if the slaveholders were not stopped, it would only be a question of time until they spread their system of elite rule to the entire country. Poor men would be bound for life into menial labor, and American democracy would die.

It [slavery] has exercised absolute mastery over the American Church. . . . With the Bible in their hands, her priesthood have attempted to prove that slavery came down from God out of heaven. They have become slaveholders and dealers in human flesh.

The idea that the country should be led by white men goes back to antebellum slaveholders, who argued that the world was naturally divided between working drudges and elite leaders, who directed their workers and used the wealth the workers produced to promote progress.

To reduce this claim of slavery to an absurdity, it is only necessary to add that there are only two states in which slaves are a majority, and not one in which the slaveholders are not a very disproportionate minority.

… a number of us had formed an organization for mutual protection against slaveholders and kidnappers, and had resolved to prevent any of our brethren being taken back into slavery, at the risk of our own lives…. Kidnapping was so common … that we were kept in constant fear.

For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

The men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slaveowners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South.

Five of its nine silk gowns are worn by Slaveholders. More than half its long Bench is filled with Slaveholders. Its Chief Justice is a Slaveholder. The Free States with double the population of the Slave State, do not have half the Judges. The majority represent a minority of 350,000. The minority represent a majority of twenty Millions!

It is no novelty to find the Supreme Court following the lead of the Slavery Extension party, to which most of its members belong. Five of the Judges are slaveholders, and two of the other four owe their appointments to their facile ingenuity in making State laws bend to Federal demands in behalf of ‘the Southern institution.’

Abraham Lincoln would have been happy to have solved the slavery problem by compensation - in fact, drew up a gradual, compensated emancipation plan as early as November, 1861 - but no slaveholders were willing to go along with it.

When the blood of our citizens, shed by a British soldiery, had stained our streets, and flowed upon the heights which surround us, and sunk into the earth upon the plains of Lexington and Concord, then when he, whose name can never be pronounced by American lips without the strongest emotion of gratitude and love to every American heart--when he, that slaveholder, who from this canvass smiles upon you, his children, with paternal benignity, came with other slaveholders to drive the British myrmidons from this city, and in this hall, our fathers did not refuse to hold communion with them. "With slaveholders they formed the Confederation, neither asking nor receiving any right to interfere in their domestic relations; with them they made the Declaration of Independence

Judging from my own observation and experience, I believe these holidays to be among the most effective means, in the hands of slaveholders, of keeping down the spirit of insurrection among the slaves. To enslave men, successfully and safely, it is necessary to have their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived. A certain degree of attainable good must be kept before them. These holidays serve the purpose of keeping the minds of the slaves occupied with prospective pleasure, within the limits of slavery

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.

To be an Abolitionist was not for the faint-hearted. The slaveholders represented for the first half of the nineteenth century the most closely knit and most important single economic unit in the nation, their millions of bondsmen and millions of acres of land comprising an investment of billions of dollars. This economic might had its counterpart in political power, given its possessors dominance within the nation and predominance within the South.

There is very little moral mixture in the 'Antislavery' feeling of this country. A great deal is abstract philanthropy; part is hatred of slaveholders; a great part is jealousy for white labor, very little is consciousness of wrong done and the wish to right it.

What shall be said, then, of those who insist upon ignoring the question of slavery as not involved in this deadly feud, and maintain that the only issue is, the support of the government and the preservation of the Union? Surely, they are "fools and blind"; for it is slaveholders alone who have conspired to seize the one, and overturn the other. As long as the enslavement of a single human being is sanctioned in the land, the curse of God will rest upon it.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

Insurance policies from the slavery era have been discovered in the archives of several insurance companies, documenting insurance coverage for slaveholders for damage to or death of their slaves, issued by a predecessor insurance firm. These documents provide the first evidence of ill-gotten profits from slavery, which profits in part capitalized insurers whose successors remain in existence today.

I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity…a shelter under…which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection