United States Quotes

See the Vermont Constitution for another variant of how slavery was abolished: {616994}

This treaty shows slaves were a major currency of the times and cultures. The Arab Armies of Egypt and the Nubians with this treaty declared an armistice. The extensive Arab use of Black slaves officially begun at this time, has plagued Africa since. Arab slave traders were the middle men who met the European and American demand for slaves until the 19th century. Even at the millennium the Sudanese civil war between the Arab North and Black South has reflected this resentment and hostility and has involved the Northerner’s enslaving tens of thousands of Black Southerners.

He was the last Pope to hold temporal power. This defense of slavery was all the more surprising because America was fighting about the issue in the Civil War and nations like England had abolished slavery. 99 years later Vatican II altered Pius IX’s statement forever. See {612715}.

The perception of the necessity of slavery was evident very early in the South.

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.

Louisiana to this day has a different legal system from the rest of the United States as it was originally based on the French Napoleonic Code. Most people did not realize that Louisiana had strictures against breaking up families—even with slaves.

This quotation illustrates the strong abolitionist tendency in the Ohio Territory. Under this clause, escaped slaves from Southern states would not be returned by the state authorities. Even more insulting to the slave enthusiasts of the South, if a Southerner brought any slaves into Ohio with them as was common for Southerners traveling with their personal slaves or horse team drivers, those slaves would be free. An interesting aspect of this clause of the Ohio Constitution was that the beginning was, word for word, copied from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. See {618100}.

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 however changed that. See {629184}.

Incredibly, the judges received a higher fee if they found that an accused Negro was a fugitive slave and must be returned, than if he found that it was a case of mistaken identity or the laws of the northern state allowed mandated freedom. Despite the bias, the moral issue was so profound that many Northern judges refused to return fugitive slaves, even after the Fugitive Slave Act.

He was also himself a ship owner in the slave trade and he was the brother of the leading Rhode Island abolitionist, Moses Brown. See {585793}. Brown became the first American, prosecuted in federal court for illegal slave trading –-- a prosecution brought, in part, by his own brother. He was, however, acquitted.

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.

After the civil war there was a concerted effort to shape American opinion away from the notion that the Civil War has mainly about slavery which we now know was a false notion. Slavery was the only significant issue for both sides. This quotation is cited by many who argue that the prospect of the end of slavery was tantamount to economic confiscation and impoverishment for the slave owning minority and hence it drove them to rebellion. Also, Davis and others argue that the value of the slaves was so great that there was no possible economic way to compensate the slave owners for emancipation at fair market value which was why that “compromise” never went anywhere.

Fitzhugh was a Southern iconoclast whose view of Northern labor was much like that of Karl Marx but who was an enthusiastic supporter of slavery. Fitzhugh was of the opinion that slavery would be reinstated in the North and his treatise agues for that. More and more intellectual opinion was coming to the conclusion that slavery must be abolished or made universal before Lincoln’s famous statement in his debate against Douglas. Although Northerners and Southerners had come to agree on this point, they disagreed about which alternative would and should prevail.