Jefferson Davis Quotes

The laws recognize no obligation on the part of the slave to labor for or serve his master. If he refuse to labor, the law will not interfere to compel him. The master must do his own flogging, as in the case of an ox or a horse.

To his slaves [he was] a just and benevolent master.

Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the servitude in the patriarchal families.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

The love of the slave for his chains is a huge, unnatural lie, and the daily lives of the whole slave-holding fraternity bear continual testimony against the assumption.

Woman was the first human being that tasted bondage. Woman was a slave before the slave existed.

Slavery is the rule. Freedom the exception.

I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could.

I am a firm believer in slavery.

I've read stories of slave owners who were very generous. They didn't keep them in shackles, they didn't whip the slaves, they built schools and churches for them, free housing, free food, free everything. It's wrong. No matter how nice you make it look, it's wrong.

Slavery is perhaps the greatest affront to the fundamental principle of individual liberty.

Slavery can never be abolished.

These poor wretches were stolen from their homes, carried to a strange country, and sold to servitude, from which they sought to escape on the first occasion which offered.

God knows I detest slavery but it is an existing evil, and we must endure it and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution.

It has always been a great wrong that these men and their families should be held in bondage.

Why is Slavery so much condemn'd and strove against in one Case, and so highly applauded and held so necessary and so sacred in another?

The Soul of man is made an article of merchandize by his fellow man and can such a land be happy? No! Happyness does not dwell in any land that is scard by the blighting curse of Slavery.

What slavery really demonstrated was that we don't really know how to use energy wisely and that we can be incredibly abusive and barbaric.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

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

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.