Slave

“ Is there in the drama of humanity a figure more picturesque or more pathetic than the figure of the African slave, as he followed his master to the battle-field, marched and hungered and thirsted with him, served and cheered and nursed him—that master who was fighting to keep him in slavery? ”

“ The slaveholder finds it necessary to have these implements to keep the slave in bondage; finds it necessary to be able to say, "Unless you do so and so; unless you do as I bid you—I will take away your life!" ”

“ Experience had made me so well acquainted with the dangers that beset the life of a slave, that I determined, as a matter of prudence, to say nothing to any one of the adventures of this Sunday, but went to work on Monday morning, at the summons of the overseer's horn, as if nothing unusual had occurred. ”

“ The heart-rending incidents, related in the foregoing chapter, led me, thus early, to inquire into the nature and history of slavery. Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time this was not so? ”

“ The cardinal principle of slavery, that the slave is not to be ranked among sentient beings, but among things—is an article of property, a chattel personal—obtains as undoubted law in all the slave states. ”

“ Beneath its beneficent folds, wherever it is carried, on land or sea, Slavery will disappear, like darkness under the arrows of the ascending sun - like the Spirit of Evil before the Angel of the Lord. ”

“ In other words, our society includes a great mass of slaves, who must be fed, clothed, housed and amused as slaves, and that their daily necessity compels them to make the slave-wares whose use is the perpetuation of their slavery. ”

“ Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter;—what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! ”

“ Similarly, any one of us can feel that to have hundreds and thousands of slaves, let alone soldiers, might give a certain imaginative pleasure in magnificence. To have one slave reveals all the meanness of slavery. ”

“ The modern slave is he who does not receive his powers from the unseen, and give reverence, but who thinks he is his own little boss. Only a slave would take the trouble to shout: “I am free!” That is to say, to shout it in the face of the open heavens. In the face of men, and their institutions and prisons. ”

“ It is eighteen inches long, with a group of silver figures on it, representing Religion with the Bible in her hand, giving liberty to the slave. The slave is a masterly piece of work. He stands with his hands clasped, looking up to heaven, while a white man is knocking the shackles from his feet. ”

“ At the appointed hour the grounds are thronged with men, women, and children, waiting, like criminals, to hear their doom pronounced. The slave is sure to know who is the most humane, or cruel master, within forty miles of him. ”

“ "This is God's curse on slavery!—a bitter, bitter, most accursed thing!—a curse to the master and a curse to the slave! I was a fool to think I could make anything good out of such a deadly evil. It is a sin to hold a slave under laws like ours,—I always felt it was,—I always thought so when I was a girl,—I thought so still more after I joined the church; but I thought I could gild it over,—I thought, by kindness, and care, and instruction, I could make the condition of mine better than freedom—fool that I was!" ”

“ If a slave ran away and succeeded in getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or did anything very wrong in the mind of a slave-holder, it was spoken of as the fruit of abolition. ”

“ What mockery, to talk of pecuniary intercourse between a slave and his master! The slave himself, with all he is and has, is an article of merchandise. What can he owe his master? A rustic may lay a wager with his mule, and give the creature the peck of oats which he has permitted it to win. ”

“ You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world ”

“ With this purpose in view, we have sketched a history of the African slave trade, showing how slavery originated; have defined slavery—proving that its essential principle is property in a human being; and laws, facts and incidents have been adduced to illustrate the system so that even a child may see and feel its enormity. ”

“ But, sir, reverse this scene: people this fair domain with the slaves of your planters; extend slavery, this bane of man, this abomination of heaven, over your extended empire, and you prepare its dissolution; you turn its accumulated strength into positive weakness; you cherish a canker in your breast; you put poison in your bosom; you place a vulture preying on your heart — nay, you whet the dagger and place it in the hands of a portion of your population, stimulated to use it by every tie, human and divine. ”

“ The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write.—When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man! ”

“ Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had mastered your A B C, or knew where the "white sails" of the Chesapeake were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and blighting death which gathers over his soul. ”

“ The slave is entirely subject to the will of his master, who may correct and chastise him, though not with unusual rigor, nor so as to maim or mutilate him, or to expose him to the danger of loss of life, or to cause his death. ”

“ Well, better so, I thought, than that they should be slaves. I knew the doom that awaited my fair baby in slavery, and I determined to save her from it, or perish in the attempt. I went to make this vow at the graves of my poor parents, in the burying-ground of the slaves. "There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor; the servant is free from his master." ”

“ The time has come--the trial has been made--the hour is striking: you have no longer a pretext for hesitation, or faltering, or delay. The slave has shown, by four years' blameless behavior and devotion, unsurpassed by any English peasant, to the pursuit of peaceful industry, that he is as fit for his freedom as any lord whom I now address. ”

“ I base this conclusion on the fact, that neither the one, nor the other, receive any thing more than their victuals and clothes, and the slave is better fed, and better clothed than the poor white man. ”

“ Or, a case might be, for it is presumable, that the master, from some obliqueness of understanding, might not wish some slave, even in good health, to labour at all, but would prefer, at great expense, to maintain such slave in luxury and idleness, clothed in purple and fine linen, and faring sumptuously every day: surely, such slave, would be under no obligation to labour for the benefit of the master, when, to do so, would be acting contrary to his will and command. Yet none of these circumstances make the slave a freeman, or alter at all the essentials of slavery. ”

“ Starvation, the bloody whip, the chain, the gag, the thumb-screw, cat-hauling, the cat-o’-nine-tails, the dungeon, the blood-hound, are all in requisition to keep the slave in his condition as a slave in the United States. ”

“ The slave-holders are neither more nor less than men, some of whom are good and very many are bad. My master and this gentleman were certainly of the number of the good, but the contrast between them and some others that I have seen, was, unhappily for many of the slaves, very great. ”

“ If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year. ”

“ Thou, my slave, As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant; And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands, Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, By help of her more potent ministers, And in her most unmitigable rage, Into a cloven pine; within which rift Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain A dozen years; within which space she died, And left thee there, where thou didst vent thy groans As fast as mill-wheels strike. ”

“ Objects in themselves indifferent, which they are forbidden to touch, or even approach, excite in the minds of the unreflecting, ungovernable impulses. The slave, who is taught from infancy, to regard his condition as unchangeable, and his fate as fixed, by the laws of nature, fancies that he sees his master in possession of that happiness which he knows has been denied to himself. ”

“ A faithful slave, having grown up with his master's rising family, obtained his freedom as a reward for his fidelity, and was entrusted with the management of the property; realizing some money, he became the owner of slaves himself, from among whom he selected his wife, and to all of whom he showed the greatest consideration. ”

“ Recapitulating, we may define a slave in the ordinary sense of the word as a man who is the property of another, politically and socially at a lower level than the mass of the people, and performing compulsory labour. ”

“ From these authorities and facts it is clear that a slave occupies a relation as far beneath the apprentice, miner, hired laborer, or even the villein of the Feudal Age, or the Russian serf, as mere property is beneath manhood with all its possessions and God-like powers—as far as a brute is below a man “made in the image of God.” ”

“ If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave?
If ye do not feel the chain,
When it works a brother's pain,
Are ye not base slaves indeed,
Slaves unworthy to be freed? ”

“ Slaveholding, then, is the constant or habitual perpetration of the act of man-stealing. To make a slave is man-stealing—the ACT itself—to hold him such is man-stealing—the habit, the permanent state, made up of individual acts. ”

“ Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being a "bran new fact"—the first one out. ”

“ The slave might rail at his master, intoxicate himself like his betters, sit down at table with them, and not even a word of reproof would be administered to him for conduct which at any other season might have been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or death. ”

“ My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. ”

“ But of these four hundred thousand slave-holders, only about eight thousand owned more than fifty slaves each, and it was this mere handful who lived in splendid homes, surrounded with luxury, beauty, and refinement. ”

“ The accounts which tell against the slave-system are derived from the continual living testimony of the poor slave himself; often from that of the fugitives from slavery who are continually passing through our Northern cities. ”

“ The slave-holder claims the slave as his Property. The very idea of a slave is, that he belongs to another, that he is bound to live and labor for another, to be another's instrument, and to make another's will his habitual law, however adverse to his own. ”

“ The slave no doubt in many cases, owing the loss of his personal liberty to the fortunes of war, being either a captive or a captive's child, might, although a foreigner, be of as good birth and hereditary intellect as his master. ”

“ It is only when we contemplate the slave as a moral and intellectual being, that we can adequately comprehend the unparalleled enormity of slavery, and the intense criminality of the slaveholder. I have said that the slave was a man. “What a piece of work is man! ”

“ If a slave is found out of the limits of the town in which he lives, or beyond the plantation on which he is usually employed, without a written permission from his master, or the company of some white person, any body may inflict twenty lashes upon him; and if the slave resist such punishment, he may be lawfully killed. ”