Harriet Jacobs Quotes

When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.

The mere toleration of the slave trade could not make slavery itself - the right of property in man - lawful any where; not even on board the slave ship. Toleration of a wrong is not law.

Increase of slaves in this colony is injurious to the poor and inconvenient

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

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.

This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.

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?

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

In a word, if any kind of slavery can be vindicated by the Holy Scriptures, we are already sure our making and holding the Negroes our slaves, as we do, cannot be vindicated by any thing we can find there, but is condemned by the whole of divine revelation.

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

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.

The slaves had food stamps, too. It was called 'scraps from Massa's table.'

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.

The mere holding of slaves, therefore, is a condition having per se nothing of moral character in it, any more than the being a parent, or employer, or ruler.

Slavery is not penal in character and planned by that law which commands the preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance.

Use all the Negroes you can get for ... cooking, digging, chopping and such. But don't arm them. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.

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.

Is not the meager, thin, long, chop-fallen, half-starved savage, as you find him a prisoner of war in negro land, a barbarian, compared to the happy, contented, well developed, strong, hearty, well clothed, well fed, negro slave in his Christianized state of American Slavery?

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

The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized; they belong to the class. We know bare facts; it is only the general experience of human beings in like condition which can clothe them with life. The outlines are certain, the details are inferential.

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.