Quotes About Slavery In The United States

#1. Woman
with a capital letter
should by now have ceased to be a specialty. There should be no more need of "movements" on her behalf, and agitations for her advancement and developmentthan for the abolition of negro slavery in the United States.

Mary Virginia Terhune

#2. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

Toni Morrison

#3. It is perfectly clear, in the first place, that the constitution of the United States did not, of itself, create or establish slavery as a new institution; or even give any authority to the state governments to establish it as a new institution. The greatest sticklers for slavery do not claim this.

Lysander Spooner

#4. Even if the Constitution of the United States had intended to recognize slavery, as a constitutional state institution, such intended recognition would have failed of effect, and been legally void, because slavery then had no constitutional existence to be recognized.

Lysander Spooner

#5. Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?

Alexander Hamilton

#6. The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

Colson Whitehead

#7. Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America. And then it goes back to slavery. And I'm sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I'm a black man in America.

Herman Cain

#8. As the United States lagged behind the civilized world in outlawing human slavery, so the United States now lags behind in softening the unrestrained brutalities of animal slavery.

Peter Singer

#9. Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States ... I have, throughout my whole life, held the practice of slavery in ... abhorrence.

John Adams

#10. I think that slavery is wrong, morally, socially and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.

Abraham Lincoln

#11. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#12. December, 1865, of the celebrated 13th article or amendment of the Constitution, which declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude - except as a punishment for crime - shall exist within the United States.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#13. [T]he only thing the United States government ever did about slavery was to abolish it. Perhaps that was a mistake, but I do not feel inclined to apologize for it.

Jeff Cooper

#14. They'd heard it all, but hadn't they earned their freedom? The days of running through forests and living under floorboards. Wasn't that the price they had paid?

Yaa Gyasi

#15. Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.

Howard Zinn

#16. It states, History should be regarded as a means for understanding the past and solving the challenges of the future. It also suggests that this celebration of the end of slavery is an important and enriching part of the history and heritage of the United States.

Mark Foley

#17. It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

C.L.R. James

#18. The flow of people into the United States into slavery, it follows the other types of immigration into the United States, so people who are trying to build new lives, trying to build a better life.

Kevin Bales

#19. Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppres the black population. Under no circumstance can they represent the workers, farmers and revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighted people who form the majority of the white population.

Mao Tse-tung

#20. I think a commission set up to examine slavery and the consequences of it, would probably be a very fruitful, important dialogue for the United States to be involved in.

Bob Matsui

#21. Despite the legacy of slavery, the near extermination of native Americans, and persistent racial, sexual, and social discrimination, the citizens of the United States could plausibly claim, in 1945, to live in the freest society on the face of the earth.

John Lewis Gaddis

#22. The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism - the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#23. The United States has never done away with slavery; we just stopped calling it such. These days, we call it free-market capitalism.

Michel Templet

#24. The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined to keep them in this condition; and Massachusettsis one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape.

Henry David Thoreau

#25. No, now the domestic market is full up with other planters' troublesome slaves. Our only salvation is to scientifically breed a stable order of docile Negro. I've come up with three tenets: Isolation. Religion. Family...." Master Ben

Jonathan Odell

#26. In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

Karl Marx

#27. While the framers of the United States Constitution were ashamed of slavery and used euphemisms in place of the term "slave", the authors of the Confederate Constitution proudly used the term no less than ten times.

C.L. Gammon

#28. Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.

Kitty Kelley

#29. African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing.

Jefferson Davis

#30. It was no coincidence that the biblical defense of slavery remained strongest in the United States, a place where democratic, antitraditional, and individualistic religion was also strongest.

Mark A. Noll

#31. Mistakes from our collective past are like any other: they require intervention--a remedy--to correct. They don't erase themselves over time.

Jonathan R. Miller

#32. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates