Harriet Beecher Stowe

“ Does any one wish to know what is inscribed on the seal which keeps the great stone over the sepulchre of African mind? It is this;—which was so truly said by poor Topsy,—“Nothing but a nigger!”
It is this, burnt into the soul by the branding-iron of cruel and unchristian scorn, that is a sorer and deeper wound than all the physical evils of slavery together.
There never was a slave who did not feel it. Deep, deep down in the dark, still waters of his soul is the conviction, heavier, bitterer than all others, that he is not regarded as a man. ”

“ Should we not say that a public sentiment which saw no cruelty in thus depriving a whole race of every right dear to manhood could see no cruelty in anything, and had proved itself wholly unfit to judge upon the subject? What man would not rather see his children in the grave than see them slaves? What man, who, should he wake to-morrow morning in the condition of an American slave, would not wish himself in the grave? ”

“ Will they tell the great Judge that it was necessary to preserve the slave system,—that it could not be preserved without them?
Will they dare look upon those eyes, which are as a flame of fire, with any such avowal?
Will He not answer, as with a voice of thunders, “Ye have killed the poor and needy, and ye have forgotten that the Lord was his helper”?
The deadly sin of slavery is its denial of humanity to man. This has been the sin of oppression, in every age. ”

“ I defy anybody on earth to read our slave-code, as it stands in our law-books, and make anything else of it. Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse. And the only reason why the land don’t sink under it, like Sodom and Gomorrah, is because it is used in a way infinitely better than it is. For pity’s sake, for shame’s sake, because we are men born of women, and not savage beasts, many of us do not, and dare not,—we would scorn to use the full power which our savage laws put into our hands. ”

“ Your unoffending posterity will be visited, for your iniquity, by the stigma of deriving their origin from an unfeeling murderer. Your days, which will be but few, will be spent in wretchedness; and, if your conscience be not steeled against every virtuous emotion, if you be not entirely abandoned to hardness of heart, the mangled, mutilated corpse of your murdered slave will ever be present in your imagination, obtrude itself into all your amusements, and haunt you in the hours of silence and repose. ”

“ He may have been a pirate on the high seas; he may be a drunkard; he may, like Souther, have been convicted of a brutality at which humanity turns pale; but, for all that, American slave-law will none the less trust him with this irresponsible power,—power over the body, and power over the soul.
On which side, then, stands the American nation, in the great controversy which is now going on between self-government and despotism? On which side does America stand, in the great controversy for liberty of conscience? ”

“ And now, gentlemen, if I have violated the laws of North Carolina, by them I am willing to be judged, condemned, and punished; to go to the whipping-post, pillory or jail, or even to hug the stake. But, gentlemen, you are not generally a pack of ignoramuses; your good sense teaches you the impropriety of your course; you know that you are doing wrong; you know that it is not right to trample all law, both human and divine, in the dust, out of professed love for it. You must see that your course will lead to perfect anarchy and confusion. ”

“ Is not a slave a reasonable creature?—is he not a human being? And the meaning of this phrase, reasonable creature, is, a human being. For the killing a lunatic, an idiot, or even a child unborn, is murder, as much as the killing a philosopher; and has not the slave as much reason as a lunatic, an idiot, or an unborn child?
Thus triumphantly, in this nineteenth century of the Christian era and in the State of Mississippi, has it been made to appear that the slave is a reasonable creature,—a human being! ”

“ Is it true love to a friend to accept the ravings of insanity as a true specimen of his mind? Is it true love to accept the disfigurement of sickness as a specimen of his best condition? Is it not truer love to say, "This curse is no part of our brother; it dishonors him; it does him injustice; it misrepresents him in the eyes of all nations. We love his better self, and we will have no fellowship with his betrayer. This is the part of true, generous, Christian love."
But will it be said. "The abolition enterprise was begun in a wrong spirit, by reckless, meddling, impudent fanatics"? ”

“ In this aspect, the slave’s condition is truly indescribable. Suspense, even when it relates to an event of no great moment, and “endureth but for a night,” is hard to bear. But when it broods over all, absolutely all that is dear, chilling the present with its deep shade, and casting its awful gloom over the future, it must break the heart! Such is the suspense under which every slave in the breeding states lives. It poisons all his little lot of bliss. If a father, he cannot go forth to his toil without bidding a mental farewell to his wife and children. ”

“ Every Christian ought seriously to examine the extent to which our national government is pledged and used for the support of slavery. He should thoroughly look into the statistics of slavery in the District of Columbia, and, above all, into the statistics of that awful system of legalized piracy and oppression by which hundreds and thousands are yearly torn from home and friends, and all that heart holds dear, and carried to be sold like beasts in the markets of the South. The smoke from this bottomless abyss of injustice puts out the light of our Sabbath suns in the eyes of all nations. ”

“ All this temporizing and concession has been excused on the plea of brotherly love. What a plea for us Northern freemen! Do we think the slave-system such a happy, desirable thing for our brothers and sisters at the South? Can we look at our common schools, our neat, thriving towns and villages, our dignified, intelligent, self-respecting farmers and mechanics, all concomitants of free labor, and think slavery any blessing to our Southern brethren? ”

“ A narrative of the ordinary events in the lives of commonplace people would be insufferably dull and insipid; and a book made up of such materials would be, to the elegant and graphic pictures of life and manners which we have in the writings of Sir Walter Scott and Dickens, what a surveyor’s plot of a ten-acre field is to a painted landscape, in which the eye is charmed by a thousand varieties of hill and dale, of green shrubbery and transparent water, of light and shade, at a glance. ”

“ This system bears with extreme severity upon the slave. It subjects him to a perpetual fear of being sold to the "soul-driver," which to the slave is the realization of all conceivable woes and horrors, more dreaded than death. An awful apprehension of this fate haunts the poor sufferer by day and by night, from his cradle to his grave. Suspense hangs like a thunder-cloud over his head. He knows that there is not a passing hour, whether he wakes or sleeps, which may not be the last that he shall spend with his wife and children. ”

“ In the section of this great country where I live, on the banks of the mighty Mississippi river, we have the true emblem of the tree of liberty. There you may see the giant cotton-wood spreading his branches widely to the winds of heaven. Sometimes the current lays bare his roots, and you behold them extending far around, and penetrating to an immense depth in the soil. When the season of maturity comes, the air is filled with a cotton-like substance, which floats in every direction, bearing on its light wings the living seeds of the mighty tree. ”

“ Anger, wrath, selfishness and jealousy, have all a certain degree of vitality. They often produce more show, more noise and temporary results, than love. Still, all these passions have, in themselves, the seeds of weakness. Love, and love only, is immortal; and when all the grosser passions of the soul have spent themselves by their own force, love looks forth like the unchanging star, with a light that never dies. ”

“ And as, when the torturing work was done, and the poor soul flew up to the judgment-seat, to stand there in awful witness, there was not a vestige of humanity left in that dishonored body, nor anything by which it could be said, "See, this was a man!"—so, when Slavery has finished her legitimate work upon the soul, and trodden out every spark of manliness, and honor, and self-respect, and natural affection, and conscience, and religious sentiment, then there is nothing left in the soul, by which to say, "This was a man!" ”

“ I address you as a rich Christian freeman and father, while I am myself but a poor slave-mother! I come to plead with you for an only child whom I love, who is a professor of the Christian religion with yourself, and a member of a Christian church; and who, by your act of ownership, now pines in her imprisonment in a loathsome man-warehouse, where she is held for sale! I come to plead with you for the exercise of that blessed law, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them.” ”

“ If the Bible guarantees this right, and sanctions this trade, why should it shock you to see the slave-trader at the communion-table? Do you feel that there is blood on his hands,—the blood of human hearts, which he has torn asunder? Do you shudder when he touches the communion-bread, and when he drinks the cup which "whosoever drinketh unworthily drinketh damnation to himself"? But who makes the trader? Do not you? Do you think that the trader's profession is a healthy one for the soul? ”

“ We love Jesus Christ, because he is the Lamb without spot, the one altogether lovely. We love the Holy Comforter, because he comes to convince the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment. O, holy church universal, throughout all countries and nations! O, ye great cloud of witnesses, of all people and languages and tongues!—differing in many doctrines, but united in crying Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, for he hath redeemed us from all iniquity!—awake!—arise up!—be not silent! ”

“ They seem to see nothing in the system but its gross bodily abuses. If these are absent, they think there is no harm in it. They do not consider that the twelve hours’ torture of some poor victim, bleeding away his life, drop by drop, under the hands of a Souther, is only a symbol of that more atrocious process by which the divine, immortal soul is mangled, burned, lacerated, thrown down, stamped upon, and suffocated, by the fiend-like force of the tyrant Slavery. ”

“ That human nature, which, in the person of the poor slave, has been despised and rejected, scoffed and scorned, scourged and tortured, shall in that day be glorified; and it shall appear the most fearful of sins to have made light of the sacredness of humanity, as these laws and institutions of slavery have done. The fact is, that the whole system of slave-law, and the whole practice of the slave system, and the public sentiment that is formed by it, are alike based on the greatest of all heresies, a denial of equal human brotherhood. ”

“ Such ways and means as any man shall think fit, of any character, of any degree of fiendish barbarity!! Such a permission to kill even a dog, by "any ways and means which anybody should think fit," never ought to stand on the law-books of a Christian nation; and yet this stands against one bearing that same humanity which Jesus Christ bore.—against one, perhaps, who, though blinded, darkened and ignorant, he will not be ashamed to own, when he shall come in the glory of his Father, and all his holy angels with him! ”

“ Robert P. Breckenridge, D.D., a member of the Old School Assembly, has thus described the state of the slave population as to their marriage relations: “The system of slavery denies to a whole class of human beings the sacredness of marriage and of home, compelling them to live in a state of concubinage; for in the eye of the law no colored slave-man is the husband of any wife in particular, nor any slave-woman the wife of any husband in particular; no slave-man is the father of any children in particular, and no slave-child is the child of any parent in particular.” ”

“ Think you such prayers as poor Paul Edmondson’s, such death-bed scenes as Emily Russell’s, are witnessed without emotion by that generous Saviour, who regards what is done to his meanest servant as done to himself?
Did it never seem to you, O Christian! when you have read the sufferings of Jesus, that you would gladly have suffered with him? Does it never seem almost ungenerous to accept eternal life as the price of such anguish on his part, while you bear no cross for him? ”

“ Yet this power to control the conscience, to control the religious privileges, and all the opportunities which man has of acquaintanceship with his Maker, and of learning to do his will, is, under the flag of every slave state, and under the flag of the United States, placed in the hands of any men, of any character, who can afford to pay for it. It is a most awful and most solemn truth that the greatest republic in the world does sustain under her national flag the worst system of despotism which can possibly exist. ”