Contraband (slavery)

“ But my complaint is that they content themselves with representing slavery as an evil—a misfortune—a calamity which has been entailed upon us by former generations,—and not as an individual CRIME, embracing in its folds, robbery, cruelty, oppression, and piracy. They do not identify the criminal; they make no direct, pungent, earnest appeal to the consciences of men-stealers. ”

“ And those are the men who will expose themselves to the chances of a pro-slavery war with an anti-slavery people! Will they not look upon every captain as a John Brown, and every sergeant and private as a Coppoc or a Stevens? They will hardly have men enough to quiet their fears at home. What will they have to oppose to the enemy? If they want to protect slavery then, every township will want its home regiment, every plantation its garrison. No sooner will a movement of concentration be attempted, than the merest panic may undo and frustrate it. ”

“ A people long used to hardship, dependent on the capricious mercy of their masters, subject without appeal to impositions laid on them by the stronger hand, they learned by daily experience that government by laws made without their own consent, and administered by officers imposed on them against their will, was the very definition of slavery. ”

“ He saw them clinging to the half frantic husband and father, when the minions of a wicked law tore him away from them for ever. That intelligent, worthy, industrious man was ruthlessly plunged into the deep, dark grave of slavery, where tens of thousands perish yearly, and leave no record of their wrongs. ”

“ Let it not be said, as is sometimes done, that cruel deeds are perpetrated every where else, as well as in slave-countries. Be it so; but in all civilized nations unscourged by [Pg 83] slavery, a principal object of legislation is to protect every man from cruelty, and to bring every man to punishment, who wantonly tortures or wounds another; whilst slavery plucks off restraint from the ferocious, or leaves them to satiate their rage with impunity.—Let it not be said that these barbarities are regarded no where with more horror than at the South. ”

“ They attacked the pro-slavery men in the roads and at their dwellings, and committed most flagrant outrages. These organizations and their actions were condemned by the prominent and more respectable portions of the free-state party, and very few of the actual settlers of the territory had any lot or part in their proceedings. They were chiefly composed of men of desperate fortunes, who were actuated in many instances as much by a disposition to plunder as from a spirit of retaliation and revenge for insults and injuries they had received. ”

“ By attending for one month, the court which the overseer of a large estate holds every evening in the cotton-gin yard, and witnessing the execution of his decrees, a Turk or a Russian would find the tribunals of his country far outdone.
It seems to be a law of nature, that slavery is equally destructive to the master and the slave; for, whilst it stupifies the latter with fear, and reduces him below the condition of man, it brutalizes the former, by the practice of continual tyranny; and makes him the prey of all the vices which render human nature loathsome. ”

“ I found it just as hard to be beaten over the head with a piece of iron in New York as it was in Virginia. Whips and chains are everywhere necessary to degrade and brutalize the slave, in order to reduce him to that abject and humble state which Slavery requires. ”

“ There is another element of power added to the anti-slavery movement, of great importance; it is the conviction, becoming every day more general and universal, that slavery must be abolished at the South, or it will demoralize and destroy liberty at the North. It is the nature of slavery to beget a state of things all around it favourable to its own continuance. This fact, connected with the system of bondage, is beginning to be more fully realized. ”

“ The invasion of any human right must do dishonor to humanity, and be a transgression of this command. How then, in the light of such obligations, must slavery be regarded? Are those men honored, who are rudely excluded from a place in the human family, and shut up to the deep degradation and nameless horrors of chattelship? Can they be held as slaves, and at the same time be honored as men?
How far, in obeying this command, we are to go, we may infer from the admonitions and instructions which James applies to the arrangements and usages of religious assemblies. ”

“ We want them to know that a knowledge of their whippings, their scourgings, their brandings, their chainings, is not confined to their plantations, but that some negro of theirs has broken loose from his chains—has burst through the dark incrustation of slavery, and is now exposing their deeds of deep damnation to the gaze of the christian people of England.
The slaveholders resort to all kinds of cruelty. ”

“ But at this moment, when it menaces the national life, it is not enough to treat Slavery merely as a nuisance, for it is much more. It is a public enemy and traitor, wherever it shows itself, to be subdued, in the discharge of solemn guaranties of Government, and in the exercise of unquestionable and [Pg 198] indefeasible rights of self-defence. All now admit that in the Rebel States it is a public enemy and traitor, so that the Rebellion is seen in Slavery, and Slavery is seen in the Rebellion. ”

“ All such punishments not only nourish the love of freedom, but breed the purpose of revenge; and it is a kind of lesson which a brutalized nature is always prone to retaliate with improvements. Will you make the act of escape a capital offence in a slave, and destroy the victim you cannot restrain? Do so. Though you may inflict death in a paroxysm of wrath, yet of all your penal dispensations it is the most merciful. It not only releases the slave himself, but is a prospective and perpetual amnesty,—a true act of oblivion,—for all his descendants. ”

“ He who (no matter where) seizes a human being, (no matter whom,) and reduces him to involuntary servitude, shall die; for he seeks to take away the rights and privileges of freedom, all that goes to make up life; seeks to make property of man, to extinguish the man in the chattel.
"But," it is said, "this only refers to stealing slaves." Mark the logic: a man could seize and enslave another with impunity; but if, afterward, the father, brother, or friend of the enslaved should attempt to rescue him, he must die! Glorious argument for slaveholders and slave-catchers! ”

“ I have here been combating the argument, that because the Fugitive Slave law is aimed at slaves, no freeman has any ground of complaint against it, even though he should be converted into a chattel under it. He must console himself under the doom of interminable bondage, with the patriotic and pious reflection that he is only suffering, as an exception, to prove the general excellence of the law ”

“ Not until after the foreign slave-trade had been prohibited and the domestic trade had been developed, and not until there was a pro-slavery reaction in the South which banished from the slave States all anti-slavery propaganda, did the systematic assistance rendered to fugitive slaves assume any large proportions or arouse bitter resentment. ”

“ You have dragged them who have never one you any wrong, in chains, and forced them into the vilest slavery, never to end but with life; such slavery as is not found among the Turks in Algiers, nor among the heathens in America. You induce the villain to steal, rob, murder men, women, and children, without number, by paying him for his execrable labor. ”

“ You and I, sir, must help pay the costs of sending a fellow-being into bondage; when we are under no more constitutional obligation to do so, than to pay the expenses of a slave dealer who ships his cargoes direct from Africa.
But the bill has become a law, and the practical question now is, how can the country be exculpated from the crime, and the dishonor. For myself, I do not adopt the doctrine of forcible nullification. I trust I shall never join a mob to resist a law, until I am ready for revolution. The only true and enduring remedy is repeal. ”

“ As Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, so the slaveholding spirit of this nation rejoices, as one barrier of liberty after another is destroyed, and fresh victims are multiplied for the cotton-field and the auction-block. For one impeachment of the slave system, a thousand defences are made. For one rebuke of the man-stealer, a thousand denunciations of the Abolitionists are heard. For one press that bears a faithful testimony against Slavery, a score are ready to be prostituted to its service. ”

“ Into what infinite forms of violence and wrong would the depraved passions of the human heart spring up, when no longer restrained by the light of day, and the dangers of exposure! So far as legal rights against his oppressors are concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness. A hundred of his fellows may stand around him and witness the wrongs he suffers, but not one of them can appeal to jury, magistrate, or judge, for punishment or redress. The wickedest white man, in a company of slaves, bears a charmed life. ”

“ An outcry arose, not only from colored people and anti-slavery men, but from persons who, although they had so far taken little interest in the matter, now felt their human sympathies and their moral sense insulted by the things they witnessed among themselves. The anti-slavery men took advantage of this change of feeling, and meetings were held in Northern cities ringing with denunciations of the fugitive-slave law as an outrage to the dignity of human nature, and as an attempt to carry slavery into the heart of the free North. ”

“ This is an ugly habit of enticing men to such a point of complicity, that an indignant husband, and a close calculator, can appear suddenly and denounce the victim. Many a slave was furnished in this way.—But we restrain the pen from tracing the villanous and savage methods, suggested by violence or fraud or lust, to keep those decks well stocked over which the lilies of France drooped with immunity.
All these negroes differed much in their sensitiveness to the condition of slavery. Many of them suffered silently, and soon disappeared, killed by labor and homesickness. ”

“ This horrible law, which in the middle of the nineteenth century of the Christian era the legislators of the most highly favored nation on earth have had the effrontery to enact,—this law peremptorily, under heavy fines and penalties, forbids us to give assistance and comfort to a certain class of our fellow-men in the utmost need of help,—those who have fled and are longing to be saved from the greatest wrongs that can be inflicted upon human beings,—the wrongs of slavery. ”

“ That perfects in meanness the sin and the shame!
What odds to the buyer whether the chattel has been kidnapped or bought by the Trader? In one sense, there is something manly (because risk of life is incurred) in taking prisoners in war and making slaves of them; but kidnapping is unmitigated villainy. How then can we sufficiently express abhorrence of the men who make a business of breeding slaves for the market? Doubtless, they are all, all honorable men, and, worthily accounted the chivalry of the land! ”

“ In citing these instances of benevolence we wish it understood, that while we approve of redeeming a captive from bondage, we utterly deny the right of the master to sell or hold the slave as property, just as we deny the right of the Corsair to the persons of his prisoners, or the ransom which may be offered for their redemption. ”

“ In the case of some offenders which seemed cardinal against the foundation principles of slavery, such as striking a master, engaging in a conspiracy with other slaves, or aiding a fugitive, the punishments were made extraordinarily severe, and slaves from surrounding plantations were obliged by their masters to gather to witness them. ”

“ Their slow and languid gait, and the trifling services which they impose, betoken only apathetic indolence; but should the slave not promptly obey, should he even fail to divine the meaning of their gestures, or looks, in an instant they are armed with a formidable whip; it is no longer the arm which cannot sustain the weight of a shawl or a reticule—it is no longer the form which but feebly sustains itself. They themselves order the punishment of one of these poor creatures, and with a dry eye see their victim bound to four stakes ”

“ We are a law-abiding people. But release us from our obligations, tear off from the bond with your own hands the signatures which bind our consciences and repress our feelings, destroy those compensations which the world and which posterity would derive from a continuance of this Union, and well may you tremble for the result. I have seen fugitive slaves at the north, and heard from their own lips the dreadful recital of their wrongs: and if I am any judge of the natural language of men ”

“ The appalling demoralization, suffering, disease, and death, which have been caused by partially substituting the invaders' system of police for the kind relation previously subsisting between the master and slave, have been a sufficient demonstration that external interference with our institution of domestic slavery is productive of evil only. ”

“ Many were the instances in which those of supposed pro-slavery convictions were brought face to face with an actual case of the threatened reenslavement of a human being escaping from bondage and were, to their own surprise, overcome by the natural, humane sentiment which asserted itself. For example, a Cincinnati merchant, who at the time was supposed to be assisting one of his Southern customers to recover an escaped fugitive, was confronted at his own home by the poor half-starved victim. ”