Roger B. Taney Quotes

You have no understanding of what it is to live in a community surcharged with an idle, dissolute, vicious, ignorant negro population just emerged from slavery.

What does it amount to if the Black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law ... is to be subject to the [former] slaveholder's shotgun?

Several of Providence Merchant John Brown’s slaves ran away to Boston. About a year later they showed up and asked to be taken in again. It says something about how hard it was to be a free Black at that time

I walked around feeling, in a sense, that people of color, we began at the bottom of a slave ship. We were enslaved; we picked cotton. There was Honest Abe, who wore a top hat and was taller than anyone and who said, 'Enough is enough; slavery must end.' And then, black people could stand up again. But after that, we didn't catch up.

Washington, not Jefferson, freed his slaves upon his death.

It has always been a great wrong that these men and their families should be held in bondage. We of the North have hitherto acquiesced in it, lest, in the endeavor to redress it in violation of the Constitution, greater evils might ensue.

Emancipation, to be of any value to the slave, must be the free, voluntary act of the master, performed from a conviction of its propriety.

I am amazed at the facility with which some men follow in the wake of slavery.

As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.

White people just don't want their slaves to be free. That's the whole thing.

One thing I incorporated in my novel 'The Poe Shadow' was the little-known fact that documents show Poe inherited a slave and decided to free him.

Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freeman with votes in their hands are left without education.

For better or for worse, (as in some of the old marriage ceremonies,) the negroes are evidently a permanent part of the American population. They are too numerous and useful to be colonized, and too enduring and self-perpetuating to disappear by natural causes. Here they are, four millions of them, and, for weal or for woe, here they must remain.

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State [instead of colonizing them]? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

To all whom these presents may come know ye, that I Peter Hawkins a free black man of the city of Richmond having purchased my wife Rose, a slave about twenty-two years of age and by her have had a child called Mary now about 18 months old, for the love I bear toward my wife and child have thought proper to emancipate them and for the further consideration of five shillings to me in hand paid …. I emancipate and set free the said Rose and Mary and relinquish all my right ... as slaves to the said Rose and Mary.

It seems absolutely necessary something should speedily be done with respect to the slaves among us, in order to our safety, and to prevent their turning against us in our present struggle, in order to get their liberty….set blacks at liberty ourselves, by some public acts and laws; and then give them proper encouragement to labor, or take arms in the defense of the American cause, as they shall choose. This would at once be doing them some degree of justice, and defeating our enemies in the scheme they are prosecuting.

Negro slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude.

All the English slaves in the whole island of Ireland should be immediately emancipated, and restored to their former liberty.

Most negroes are still serfs bound to the soil or house servants.

One thing that is not commonly taught in history classes is that the United States passed the first law of any nation outlawing slavery. That showed the world that it could be done. The state of Pennsylvania passed that law even before there were anti-slavery societies. If a slave owner from another state brought a slave to Pennsylvania and stayed for more than six months, the slave was free.

The mass of white men are really injured by the effect of slave labor in the vicinity of the fields of their own labor.

Many of the former Slaves are only nominally free, for the servile spirit is still within them.

The issue [slavery] is clear, explicit, determinate. The parties understand each other, and are drawn in battle array. They can never be reconciled--never walk together--never consent to a truce--never deal in honeyed phrases--never worship at the same altar-never acknowledge the same God. Between them there is an impassable gulf. In manners, in morals, in philosophy, in religion, in ideas of justice, in notions of law, in theories of government, in valuations or men, they are totally dissimilar.

Whatever may be the guilt of the South, the North is still more responsible for the existence, growth and extension of Slavery. In her hand has been the destiny of the Republic from the beginning. She could have emancipated every slave, long ere this, had she been upright in heart and free in spirit …. the sin .of this nation is not geographical--is not specially Southern--bus deep-seated and universal

The number of negroes do extremely increase in this Province, and through the afflicting providence of God, the whites do not proportionably multiply, by reason whereof, the safety of the said province is greatly endangered