Slaveowner

“ Again, some slaves are bought with money, and others with praise. It matters not what the purchase-money is. The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and be bought for it. Again, it matters not what kind of work you are set on; some slaves are set to forced diggings, others to forced marches; some dig furrows, others field-works, and others graves. Some press the juice of reeds, and some the juice of vines, and some the blood of men. The fact of the captivity is the same whatever work we are set upon, though the fruits of the toil may be different. ”

“ Slavery steals from mother's arms their dear ones, and leaves them to mourn their loss. The Slave laws are not obsolete, as some would have you believe, but strictly conformed to, when the interest of the owner requires it. Another case, just in point, is that of Mrs. Forester, of Washington city, the capital of the United States, who sold one of her Slaves his liberty, for three hundred dollars, but his wife and three children remained her property, as he was unable to purchase them. ”

“ Let not the apologists for slavery bring up the isolated cases of leniency, giving instruction, and affectionate attachment, that are found among some masters, as specimens of slavery! It is unfair! They form exceptions, and much do I respect them; but they are not the rules of slavery. The strife that is being stirred up is not to take away anything that belongs to another,—neither their silver or gold, their fine linen or purple, their houses or land, their horses or cattle, or anything that is their property; but to rescue a neighbor from their unmanly cupidity. ”

“ How wonderful is His providence amid the disastrous and destructive doings of men! The slave-trade has been carried on for centuries by cruel, ruthless men, without a thought of mercy. The system of slavery, in the lands of the black man's thraldom, has been a system of greed, and overwork, and lust, and premature decay, and death, with but slight and incidental alleviations. ”

“ Even in the lands of slavery, the slavetrader is loathed as an ignoble character, from whom the countenance is turned away; and can the Slave-Hunter be more regarded while pursuing his prey in a land of Freedom? ”

“ In the Southern part of the United States I was a slave, thought of and spoken of as property. In the language of the law, "held, taken, reputed and adjudged to be chattel in the hands of my owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, or assigns, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatever."—Brev. Digest, 224. In the Northern States, a fugitive slave, liable to be hunted at any moment like a felon, and to be hurried into the terrible jaws of slavery—doomed by an inveterate prejudice against color to insult and outrage in every hand. ”

“ Now, in this kingdom everyone and everything belongs to the king. He farms out his female slaves to all and sundry as rewards for meritorious services rendered the king. All children born as a result of these operations belong to the king, just as the parents do. It must be remembered that this is “domestic” slavery and not at all the horrible affair commercial slavery once was. There is no export of slaves, as the coming of the white man has prevented it. Domestic slavery entails upon the master certain duties towards the slave. ”

“ The effects of Slavery on the bond and Colonization on the free. Of the first we shall say but little, but will here repeat the language of a high-minded Virginian in the Legislature of that State, on the recent discussion of the slave question before that honorable body, who declared, that man could not hold property in man, and that the master held no right to the slave, either by a law of nature or a patentee from God, but by the will of society; which we declare to be an unjust usurpation of the rights and privileges of men. ”

“ THE SLAVE-TRADE. What is it that constitutes the vital force of the institution of slavery in this country? Slavery, being an unnatural and unhealthful condition of society, being a most wasteful and impoverishing mode of cultivating the soil, would speedily run itself out in a community, and become so unprofitable as to fall into disuse, were it not kept alive by some unnatural process. ”

“ There had to be one sweeping, general emancipation of slaves wherever they were found, under whatever circumstances, and when the state of slavery was abolished, the trade in slaves died a natural death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Make the case your own. 'Master,' said a slave at Liverpool, to the merchant that owned him, 'what if some of my countrymen were to come here, and take away mistress, and Tommy, and Billy, and carry them into our country, and make them slaves, how would you like it? 'His answer as worthy of a man 'I will never buy a slave more while live.' Let his resolution be yours. Have no more any part in this detestable business. Instantly leave it to those unfeeling wretches ' who laugh at human nature and compassion.' Be you a man; not a wolf, a devourer of the human species. ”

“ It seemed to me, that this gentleman was too benevolent a man, to arrest and send me back to my cruel mistress; and yet, how could I expect, or even hope, that a cotton planter would see a runaway slave on his premises, and not cause him to be taken up, and sent home? Failing to seize a runaway slave, when he has him in his power, is held to be one of the most dishonourable acts, to which a southern planter can subject himself. Nor should the people of the north be surprised at this. Slaves are regarded, in the south, as the most precious of all earthly possessions ”

“ The institution of slavery, wielding a most potent and commanding authority, brought every thing, in politics, science, philosophy, and letters, to bear in support of the slave trade, in maintenance of the institution of slavery, and to uphold the dogma that the Negro was but an inferior animal. ”

“ The repulsive feature of slavery is the thing, not its name. One needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of the classes that are below him to recognize—and in but indifferently modified measure—the very air and tone of the actual slaveholder; and behind these are the slaveholder's spirit, the slaveholder's blunted feeling. ”

“ These two reasons—that the new slavery is less evident than the old, and that the new slave-owners are much more numerous than the old ones—account for the fact that the slave-owners of our day do not see, and do not admit, the cruelty and criminality of their position, and do not free themselves from it. ”

“ Why do slave masters keep slaves? To get labor out of them—and to get money by their labor—and to gratify their affections and appetites by money. They keep slaves to please themselves and to pamper their families—God and their neighbor, in this relation, are as nought to them.
Why do people use slave produce? To please themselves and their company! The cry of the laborer, whose wages are kept back by fraud and force, has gone up to God against it. ”

“ The institution of slavery is as ruinous to the white man as to the black.... Three northern servants, engineered by a Yankee boarding-house keeper, would do 119 more work than a dozen of these slaves. The free blacks, who receive wages, do no more than the others. Such is the effect of slavery upon labor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These slave-owners of whom I now speak deeply deplore the circumstances under which they are placed, and, while wanting the spirit of self-sacrifice, and the moral courage, which would lead them, by manumitting their slaves, to enter into a novel competition with slave-labour on other estates, do their best to ameliorate the condition in which the Africans are placed, encouraging them, by the sale of little articles of their own manufacture, to purchase their freedom, which is granted at a very reduced rate. ”

“ Whether on the coast of Africa, among the savage tribes, or in South Carolina, among the refined and civilized, slavery is the same, and its accompaniments one and the same. It makes no difference whether the slaveholder worships the God of the Christians, or is a follower of Mahomet, he is the minister of the same cruelty, and the author of the same misery. Slavery is always slavery ”

“ A single glance at the origin of negro slavery will suggest the remedy which ought to be applied. The slavery and the slave trade of the western world began in a desire to obtain by forced labor the products of the earth. ”

“ No community of natives demonstrates the peculiar workings of domestic slavery so well as these people, for in no other place on the coast can any one find so many instances of the rapid rise of a bought slave from the lowest rung of the slave ladder to the topmost. ”

“ Our northern free states denouncing slavery as a crime, confessedly inconsistent with their civil and religious principles, yet, for commercial and pecuniary considerations, deliberately entering into a compact with slaveholders tolerating a twenty years' perpetuation of the African slave trade, the rendition of fugitives, the suppression of servile insurrections, and allowing to the slaveholders a virtual property basis of representation. ”

“ The slave system owned the minds and bodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, or to the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of the masters own their mates or the young which were born to them. The slaves were rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production of wealth for themselves and to add to their liberty and leisure and pursuit of happiness. ”

“ The slaves had been freed in 1833; but in the middle of the century England awoke to the fact that slaves are not necessarily negroes, stolen in Africa to be sold like cattle in the market place, but that multitudes of men, women, and little children in the mines and factories were victims of a more terrible industrial and social slavery. To free these slaves also, the unwilling victims of our unnatural competitive methods, has been the growing purpose of the Victorian Age until the present day. ”

“ The property of the tribe at first, slaves become at a later stage private property—probably through the institution of the tribal distribution of wealth. Cruel, revolting, and vile as slavery appears to our modern sense,—especially the earlier forms of slavery before the body of legislation, and, not less important, sentiment, which surrounded it later arose,—it still was a step forward, a distinct advance upon the older customs of cannibalism and wholesale slaughter. ”

“ On the other hand, it was contended, that slaves are deemed persons, as well as property. They partake of the qualities of both. In being compelled to labour, not for himself, but for his master; in being vendible by one master to another; and, in being subject, at all times, to be restrained in his liberty, and chastised in his body, by the will of another, the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank, and classed with the irrational animals, which fall under the denomination of property. ”

“ And so it was as far as the negro is concerned; but there is in America today another form of slavery which no clash of arms can eradicate, and this is the picture of the slaveholder: [Draw Fig. 47 complete.] The 'little brown jug,' which we use as a type of the saloon power, holds millions of men and boys in its grasp, consuming their brains, their bodies, and their money, and bringing misery and hopelessness to them and to those who love them. From Europe comes many a cry of anguish, showing that the same powerful slaveholder holds sway across the ocean. ”

“ This morning I witnessed the sale of twelve slaves, and I could but shudder at the language used and the liberties taken with the females!"
2d. As a proof, that in the kinds of servitude referred to, God did not invest Abraham, or any other person with that absolute ownership of his fellow-men, which is claimed by Southern slaveholders—I would remark, that He has made man accountable to Himself; but slavery makes him accountable to, and a mere appendage to his fellow-man. Slavery substitutes the will of a fallible fellow-man for that infallible rule of action—the will of God. ”

“ Wherever slavery exists to any considerable extent, with the exception of some recently settled portions of the country, and which have not yet felt, in a great degree, the baneful and deteriorating influence of slave labor—we hear, at this moment, the cry of suffering. ”

“ I afterwards learned from my master, that this man had formerly been engaged in the African slave-trade, which he had given up some years before, for the safer and less arduous business of buying negroes in the north, and bringing them to the south, as articles of merchandise, in which he had acquired a very respectable fortune—had lately married in a wealthy family, in this part of the country, and was a great planter. ”

“ Of the numerous classes of persons from the north who temporarily reside in the slave states, the mechanics who find employment on the plantations, are the only persons who are in circumstances to look "behind the scenes." Merchants, pedlars, venders of patents, drovers, speculators, and almost all descriptions of persons who go from the free states to the south to make money see little of slavery, except upon the road, at public inns, and in villages and cities. ”

“ To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with the fever and ague on him to stop shaking, and he will be cured. The discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what? The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class than the slaveholders of the South: suppose they should claim an equal sanctity for the Protective System. ”