Henry Charles Carey Quotes

How different has been the course pursued by the Unitarian party. How few of that numerous body, powerful from wealth and education, whether ministers or laymen, have placed themselves by the side of the suffering bondman. The freedom of discussion, which was fearlessly applied to metaphysical doctrines and theological subtleties, was found to be a dangerous weapon when it was used for the examination of an institution, the ramification of which entwined themselves around every altar of mammon worship

The negro, whom a million Americans died to free, is, in present bond and future promise still a slave, whipped by circumstance, trodden under foot by iron and ineradicable prejudice; shut out forever from the opportunities which are the heritage of liberty, and, holding in his black hand the hollow parchment of his franchise as a freeman, looks through a slave's eyes at the impassable barriers which imprison him forever within the progress and achievement of a dominant and all-conquering race.

Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one.

Prior to the Civil War, most libraries were either privately owned or housed in universities or churches.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

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.

One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.

Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.

I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.

What has the North to do with slavery? What have we to do with it, indeed! when it encircles us like the air we breathe -- as invisible but as ever near us -- when it makes our laws, controls our interests, appoints our rulers, sets a price upon our heads, demands the sacrifice of our free utterance, disfranchises in one half the States the citizens when the Constitution has made free every where--when it makes Religion its pander, and the Church its sanctuary!

The existence of laws in the States where the newly emancipated negroes reside, which discriminated with gross injustice and hardship against them as a class, was the evil to be remedied …. The one pervading purpose, was protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.

There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us ... Even when you cease to be slaves, you are far removed from being placed on an equality with the white man ... I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact

Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the Northern States it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the Southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process. That it may finally be effected and its progress hastened, will be my last and fondest prayer.

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State [instead of colonizing them]? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

In the disposition of these unfortunate people, there are two rational objects to be distinctly kept in view. First. The establishment of a colony on the coast of Africa, which may introduce among the aborigines the arts of cultivated life, and the blessings of civilization and science. By doing this, we may make to them some retribution for the long course of injuries we have been committing on their population.

Nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition, not only of the trade, but of the condition of slavery; and certainly, nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object.

Do not mistake me. I am not advocating slavery. I am not justifying the wrongs we have committed on a foreign people... On the contrary, there is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity.

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people [blacks] are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.

If any person shall knowingly publish and circulate ... any writing or pamphlet, printed or unprinted, among the free black or slave population of this district, tending to excite a discontented or insurrectionary spirit, such a person, for every such act ... ... without bail or mainprize, ... to undergo a trial for the same at the next superior court of law ...; and upon conviction thereof, shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for nor less than two, not more than seven years.

If we sent our children to school, Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery.

At some period, however, of their history, almost every people, now civilized, have consisted, in majority, of slaves. A people in that condition require to raise them out of it a very different polity from a nation of savages.

If a white teach a free negro or a slave to write he is fined $500, and imprisoned at the discretion of the Court; if the offender be a colored man, bond or free, he may be fined or whipped at the discretion of the Court

It is evident that slavery wrested its prey from the eaters of human flesh, but it has only progressed in regard to cannibalism; whenever it finds itself in the presence of Christianism, and, above all, of human reason, it must abdicate under penalty of becoming monstrous.--The persistency of the Southern States in slavery is the greatest moral deformity of the nineteenth century

Slavery to the Negro is a stepping-stone from African barbarism to Christian civilization

If a free negro in North Carolina attempt to teach a slave to read, or if he give to a slave a religious tract, a spelling book or the bible, he may be imprisoned or take thirty-nine lashes!