Quotes about Slaveholding

Ohio Ripley

While it is admitted that each State in which slavery exists has by the Constitution of the United States the exclusive right to legislate in regard to its abolition with in its own boundaries; this Society shall endeavor to convince their fellow citizens that slaveholding is a heinous sin in the sight of God. and that the duty, safety and best interests of all concerned require its immediate abandonment without expatriation.

John H. Reagan

The Constitution of the United States was made by white men, the citizens and representatives of twelve slaveholding and one non-slaveholding State; and it was made for white men.

Robert Purvis

What a burning shame it is that many of the pieces on the subject of slavery and the slave trade, contained in different school books, have been lost sight of, or been subject to the pruning knife of the slaveholding expurgatorial system!

Almost every political controversy that continues for years, ends up battleing for treatment in the school curriculum. Many modern Americans think that the fights over sex education and evolution in schools is a new thing.

Harriet Tubman

I think there's many a slaveholder'll get to Heaven. They don't know better. They acts up to the light they have.

George Templeton Strong

Virginians and all who belong to slaveholding communities seem an exceptional, abnormal race, unlike anything else in Christendom.

To justify slaveholding in one’s own mind, religion, culture, values, concepts of write & wrong all have to be twisted and when a substantial group of people do that for a number of decades, the do not form a different race but they certainly do become a different cultural subgroup. The hypocrisy of slavery and a free society is the ultimate twist of logic. Also, many modern psychologists have analyzed the extremely cruel and inhuman tortures and punishment that slave owners meted out and observed as strongly suggested abnormally sadistic perversions present in so many.

Thomas Roderick Dew

When we turn to the New Testament, we find not one single passage at all calculated to disturb the conscience of an honest slaveholder.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

… the declaration of the Confederate States themselves is proof enough, that, whatever may be declared on the other side, the maintenance of slavery is regarded by them as the vital object of their movement.

Some Southerners, in order to obtain support in England for the Confederate cause claimed in their propaganda that slavery was not the issue but their issue with the Union was just one of local and regional autonomy. The British and most Europeans at that time were strongly against slavery so this “spin” might have gotten some support. Stowe and others put the lie to this, and the Confederacy never did get any significant material support from any country in Europe. The secession resolutions of the Southern States all state that Slavery was the cause (and often the ONLY cause stated) of secession. Also Southern General Mosby, called the spin for what it was. See {584991}.

Frederick Douglass

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

William H. Seward

The United States constitute only one nation. Increase of population, which is filling the States out to their very borders, together with a new and extended network of railroads and other avenues, and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the States into a higher and more perfect social unity or consolidation. Thus, these antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and collision results. Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.

Slaveholding Quotes