Henry Clay Quotes
I know that there is a visionary dogma which holds that negro slaves cannot be the subject of property. I shall not dwell on the speculative abstraction. That IS property which the law declares TO BE property. Two hundred years of legislation have sanctified and sanctioned negro slaves as property.
Henry Clay, 1777-1852, U.S. Congressman and Senator (National Republican & Whig, KY), Speaker of the House, U.S. Secretary of State, Speech, 1839
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Jamaica, then part of the British Empire which had outlawed slavery, was quite racially integrated with negroes and mulattos in civil positions such as magistrate. When the ship landed, the slave, John Anderson, was kept locked below deck since if he ran off and reached shore, the Jamaican authorities would have declared him a free man. The presence of the captive negro slave leaked out and a group of Jamaicans boarded the ship uninvited and forcibly removed Anderson, He was taken before a Jamaican magistrate who declared him a free person. The ship’s captain demanded that the authorities return the American private property which had been stolen from an American ship by a “mob”. Harrison, the US Counsel complained to the Jamaican Governor of the “Insult” to the American Flag that had taken place and demanded redress. In both efforts, the original decision of the magistrate was supported and Anderson was a free man. Harrison, an ardent Southerner from Virginia was apoplectic and asked the State Department to make this case a major issue in relations with London. His description of the public opinion then in Jamaica was classic. His racial bias was even supplemented by a virulent anti-Semitism because not only had Jewish Jamaican merchants supported abolition of slavery but some had intermarried with Negroes who had converted to Judaism.
Before the civil rights act was passed, most labor unions will racist and discriminated against black workers. The United Auto Workers union was an exception and Reuther was a strong advocate of desegregation and equal rights.
The first sentence is inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC. The last two sentences are rarely quoted.
In the original Constitution the apportionment of members of the House of Representatives was based on the white population plus After his Presidency, Adams served in the House of Representatives for many years and was thus active in politics.
Contrast this view with that of Union General Ulysses S. Grant.
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.
We beseech His Majesty to interest himself in ameliorating the condition of negroes in the colonies.
This Cahier was the consensus of the Clergy of Blois in 1789. There were cahiers of several provinces of France—some by the clergy, some by the nobles. What is fascinating is the emergence of many of the pre-Revolutionary French concepts. The example of the American revolution and its principles was known throughout the educated classes of France.
Many free Negroes of the day did not have the paperwork, education, , sophistication, or access to attorneys that could prove that they were free. Scheming Southerner slave owners would go north find poor ignorant free blacks and swear that they ran away from their plantation. If the victim could not prove the contrary, he was enslaved, transported South and usually sold.
Johnson was then Vice President.
This quotation is very interesting historically. Despite the fact that Washington DC was a thoroughly racially segregated city, and the Southern racists controlled much of Congress, Blacks as well as whites were welcome in the Congressional galleries, and they attended many debates. Slavery and equality were not just debated in the 1850s but the issue was in constant friction from the earliest Congress.
He was the Russian Reformer who ended serfdom and gave land to the peasants and then was assassinated. Ironically, both Alexander II and Lincoln were assassinated—because of their reform efforts—Lincoln for going too far; the Czar for not going far enough. See the Nickname that was given to the Czar: {622809}.
Since a slave was not a person, he/she could not accept any gifts or own any property. They were themselves property. The Greeks, the Romans, the ancient Germans, the Poles, with the Portuguese, the Spanish and the French had provided, both by law and by custom, for the possession of property by the slave, which could, not be seized by his master. This is another sense in which American slavery was even worse than most slavery had been.
This quotation is interesting for two reasons. First it is a good example of the twisted logic of some of the Slavery apologists who claimed that the Negro slave was better off than the free wage earner. The second reason is that it illustrates the norms of the treatment of the working man before the Civil War. The union movement would change the situation for the free laborer over the next century and then holidays and worker rights became normalized in American society. See {641290} for another of his absurd arguments.
In 1831 a slave preacher, Nat Turner, led a rebellion in North Carolina killing over 50 white men. Even though Turner and the rebels were captured and executed, whites throughout the South, took vengeance on any slaves they could find.
Henry Clay Sr. was an American attorney and statesman who represented Kentucky in both the Senate and House. He was the seventh House Speaker and the ninth Secretary of State. He received electoral votes for president in the 1824, 1832, and 1844 presidential elections. He also helped found both the National Republican Party and the Whig Party. For his role in defusing sectional crises, he earned the appellation of the "Great Compromiser" and was part of the "Great Triumvirate".
