Justin Cartwright Quotes

The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.

John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection.

When you study history in American schools, very rarely is the name John Brown mentioned. We know who Kanye West is or Twyla Tharp or Shania Twain.

Strangely enough, the legend of John Brown, who was clearly crazy, helped the abolitionist cause and is thought to have precipitated the American Civil War.

[John Brown's] zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun... I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave.

Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest.

The Free State men, myself among them, took it for granted that Missouri was a slave state.

The attack of John Brown upon Harper's Ferry came upon Virginia like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky.

John Brown was tried for treason, murder, and inciting slaves to insurrection.

After the Civil war, everybody in retrospect claimed to be an abolitionist. It’s amazing that slavery survived so long when there were so many abolitionists.

No man known or suspected to be hostile to "the Compromise Measures, including the Fugitive Slave Law," is allowed to hope for any office under the present Administration.

We don't know who John Brown was, and in many ways, his work shaped where we are today. He was a Pennsylvanian. He was the prototypical Yankee who fought back and suffered in doing so.

The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.

None of the black abolitionist newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1827, was in existence after the Civil War.

America in the 1800s isn't quite the historical mystery hotbed as the same period in the country it bested in the War of Independence, but its unique spectacle of rapid social change and the lingering influence of its literary voices act in a parallel manner upon crime fiction chroniclers devoted to this side of the Atlantic.

We've actually bought quite a number of historical pieces. We are doing a piece on the abolitionists, Harper's Ferry and the abolitionist John Brown with Paul Giamatti.

To judge by what my children are learning in school, you'd think American history was 75 percent slavery and 25 percent everything else (and that 25 percent includes a large dollop of imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia, leaving little time for Lincoln, Edison, Clay, Holmes, Alcott, Dickinson, Adams, Longfellow or Fulton).

The men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slaveowners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.

If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union. A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would now be certainly necessary. The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation.

The Underground Railroad, which was the first integrated civil rights movement, is a part of our history that not a lot of us know about. And it's actually a very empowering side of our history.

Tammany Hall and slavery usually found 'The Herald' on their side.

America's gravest moral evil, chattel slavery, was defeated by an authoritarian president in a religious civil war, not by proceduralism or constitutional debate.

I was an English major in college who concentrated in African-American literature and culture. So I read quite a few slave narratives and stories of escape, and I grew up in Ohio, which was a common stop on the Underground Railroad.