Tennessee Claflin Quotes
... no community where more than one-half of the adults are disfranchised and otherwise incapacitated by law and custom, can be free from great vices. Purity is inconsistent with slavery.
Claflin, Tennie C. Constitutional Equality a Right of Woman. Woodhull, Claflin & Co., 1871.
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.
This is a memorable historical quotations because it shows the extreme level of hypocrisy and lack of logic of which man is capable of when his way of life and world view is threatened. In this case Gordon sees the right to own slaves as a basic civil right. He does not see that the right of possessing slaves totally denies virtually all civil rights to the slave. In his and other Southern views, to assure a man’s liberty he had to have the right and freedom to deny freedom to others, torture others at will, destroy families and remove all hope and aspiration of some people.
Lady Tennessee Celeste Claflin, Viscountess of Montserrat, also known as Tennie C., was an American suffragist best known as the first woman, along with her sister Victoria Woodhull, to open a Wall Street brokerage firm, which occurred in 1870.
