Benjamin Wade Quotes

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.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

Slavery is right, just, and lawful and consequently practiced every day.

I am a firm believer in slavery.

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.

Slavery can never be abolished.

Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.

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

Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

We will make slavery history very soon. We will make child labor history very soon.

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.

I protest against the fitness and truth of the usually received definitions and applications of "slave labor" and "free labor"--and, in contradiction thereto, maintain that, in proportion to the respective populations, there are many more slaves in England, and in very much more suffering and painful conditions, than in all the negro slaveholding States of this Confederation.

Twin relics of barbarism – polygamy and slavery.

The end of slavery is the profit of the master …. The slave is doomed to toil, that others may reap the fruits.

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

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

Slavery is a wrong to each individual enslaved; and not merely to the first of a series. Natural law, therefore, as much forbids the enslaving of the child, as if the wrong of enslaving the parent had never been perpetrated.

Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.

The poor North has much to do with slavery. It staggers under its load and smarts under its lash.

I have always believed, heretofore, in the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are born free and equal; but of late it appears that some men are born slaves, and I regret that they are not black, so all the world might know them.

Slavery, racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, subordination, and human rights abuse transform and adapt with the times.

Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth.

This and many others only confirmed me in the opinion, planted when I saw the sale of Martha Ann, and growing steadily thereafter, that slavery was an accursed business, and that the sooner my people were relieved of it, the better.