Slavery Quotes
Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and James Madison have the most entries. The page is not one-sided: George Fitzhugh, a proslavery writer, is fourth, so the arguments made at the time are on the record next to the condemnations. The sourced lines worth reading in full are Madison’s letters, to Lafayette in 1821, calling slavery a sad blot on our free country, and to F. Corbin in 1820. Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809) is here for the opposite sort of remark: none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Three lines are flagged. One credited to Edward R. Murrow, “We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them,” is marked misattributed. A line about freeing thousands more if they had known they were slaves, credited to Harriet Tubman, and a passage addressed “To Americans” credited to Thomas Paine are disputed.
Slavery in Cuba is a principal cause of the lamentable condition of the island.
But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.
Like a light-skinned slave boy, we're in the motherfucking house!
That execrable sum of all villanies commonly called the Slave-trade.
Another of my wishes is to depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves.