Jacob D. Wheeler Quotes

In early New England the General Court served as both a legislature and a judiciary before separation of powers was introduced. 5 years later the Court banned importing African slaves at all. While slavery was not common in Rhode Island, the laws was not seriously enforced on those who would defy them. It does represent a public anti-slavery sentiment that existed in Early America. It would take 200 years for Rhode Island to finally eliminate all forms of slavery.

This law required the treatment of Blacks as whites were then treated with respect to indentured servitude—a limit of 10 years after which the person would be free. However, this law was poorly enforced. The “General Court” was the name for the legislature of the Rhode Island colony.

Johnson had a white mistress who accompanied him visibly at a time when Blacks were lynched for dating white women in many parts of the country. He was criticized heavily by whites for going with a white woman and many Blacks for the same.

The general issued a military order emancipating slaves in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. President Abraham Lincoln rescinded the order feeling it was too premature and it would cause the slave states that stayed in the Union--Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky--to go over to the Confederates.

There was little thought of emancipating slaves or their value to the South by the senior officers of the Union Army at the beginning of the war. The Secretary of War changed that. See {629183}for a typical Union General’s view at the beginning of the war.

Generally, Jefferson was not in favor of whipping slaves, but this quotation shows that he essentially accepted the basic principles of Southern Slavery—including the one that says if the person does not want to work for you, you may whip, beat, or torture him or her to produce “reasonable work.” This acceptance of slavery and profiting from it, is the terrible blot on the record of the man who otherwise was among the few greatest of Americans.

As an entertainer she had toured much of the world and seen American slavery and that of some other nations. She became a staunch abolitionist and like entertainers in the 20th and 21st centuries she used her celebrity to give anti-slavery lectures and perform for audiences where she donated the proceeds of the event to the abolition cause. She is a particularly interesting political figure in that she seems to be one of the first entertainers to perform for a social cause and become an activist.

As a key member of Lincoln’s cabinet, William H. Seward was most concerned with preserving The Union. However, since the Constitution was written in 1787, there had been compromises made with the pro slavery forces of the South to give them proportionally more political power and to avoid interfering with the institution of slavery. The Dred Scott Supreme Court decision forced the Northern States to actively cooperate in enforcing and maintaining slavery. Large numbers of abolitionists had reached their limit and wanted no more compromises regarding slavery. Mrs. Seward was one of those. This quotation also illustrates the influence that some women had in politics even though women could not vote. Frances Seward was very much a political partner with her husband who was favored to beat Lincoln for the Republican Presidential nomination.

Southern secession and the Civil War This is one of the major quotations with which historians rebut the revisionist view that the Civil War was about States’ Rights or other economic factors.

The issue of slavery which had been suppressed in Congress for the first decades of the nation broke out when Missouri statehood was considered. By previous agreement, slavery was not even discussed in Congress but the time period elapsed. Tallmadge not only proposed that no more slaves could come into Missouri {613176} but most shocking to the Southerners was that every person born in the new state would be free at the age of 25. In a generation, there would be no more slavery in Missouri and there would be no economic compensation for slave owners at all. The House of Representatives accepted the amendment, but it failed in the Senate. At that time, Senators were not elected by voters but were appointed by the state legislators and the Southern slave states had a disproportionate share of the senate from a population point of view. But what this quotation shows clearly that a majority of the country in 1819 were opposed to slavery and were willing to end it without compensation.

Negotiations regarding the exchange of prisoners and property. This was his view of his supposed obligation to return Negro slaves who had escaped and gone to the British during the war. The treaty of peace specified that all “property” including slaves, taken by, the British be returned to the Americans. But he and other officers did not always do so as they thought they had higher moral obligations. See {621936} for example.

Miller was the first Black American admitted to a Graduate Program—Johns Hopkins—in Mathematics

During the same year England outlawed the slave trade and English citizens and ships from participating in it.

One of the many complaints that many people made at the time about Smith and his Mormons was that they opposed slavery. In fact, Smith not only opposed it be had a plan for compensating the slave owner and a method for paying for it. Smith was not advocating the kinds of personal lifestyle issues of his church the way modern religious leaders do, but was concerned with the much larger issues of expansionism, corruption of the courts and judiciary, and land distribution. He was a classic reform candidate in that sense. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.

This was a very creative solution to the problem of slavery. Slave holders and their supports have always claimed that the paid valuable money to acquire a slave and slaves were valuable personal property. Freeing slaves was the government confiscating their wealth. The Pennsylvania solution was to say that the labor of a slave for 7 years was worth far more than the cost of a slave, so that under this law, slave owners could get their monetary value back and make a modest profit, and slavery would gradually disappear over a 7 year period if no new slavery were allowed. Although it made a lot of sense, the Southern States felt that their economy was different—that they could never get free white men to pick cotton.