Roger Nash Baldwin Quotes
There is no power on earth that has the right to reduce them to slavery …. The United States is not a slave-catcher for foreign slave holders.
Baldwin was a young lawyer at the time. He represented a shipload of ex-slaves who had taken over their Spanish slave ship and landed in America. The Spanish claimed, the ship owners and some of the crew all claimed the “property.”
Roger Baldwin, *, Governor of Connecticut, Referring to the Armistad Blacks, 1839
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
His family was one of the wealthiest in Rhode Island. He called in the entire family and he formally read the deed. The family itself had actually been active in the slave trade under John, his oldest brother, so this deed was very shocking to them. Moses became a leading abolitionist in Rhode Island and John the major defender of slavery in the state. Despite that, the brothers actually remained close.
Fitzhugh was a Southern iconoclast whose view of Northern labor was much like that of Karl Marx but who was an enthusiastic supporter of slavery. Fitzhugh was of the opinion that slavery would be reinstated in the North and his treatise agues for that. More and more intellectual opinion was coming to the conclusion that slavery must be abolished or made universal before Lincoln’s famous statement in his debate against Douglas. Although Northerners and Southerners had come to agree on this point, they disagreed about which alternative would and should prevail.
The first anti-slavery newspaper published in the United States & the first journal in America to advocate immediate, unconditional emancipation
In this quotation Lincoln got out of the rhetorical trap that Douglas had set for him by disclosing his personal preferences as opposed to the positions that Douglas had accused him of being pledged to. See {615827}.
In this case, the Pope was obeyed on the issue of slavery. However, Papal injunctions against slavery have not always had the desired effect. See {617632}
This quotation illustrates the strong abolitionist tendency in the Ohio Territory. Under this clause, escaped slaves from Southern states would not be returned by the state authorities. Even more insulting to the slave enthusiasts of the South, if a Southerner brought any slaves into Ohio with them as was common for Southerners traveling with their personal slaves or horse team drivers, those slaves would be free. An interesting aspect of this clause of the Ohio Constitution was that the beginning was, word for word, copied from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. See {618100}.
A few years later he had a clearer idea of what was to be done. However, the additional factor of the Civil War played a big part in driving his Emancipation Proclamation. See {609360}
As late as 2005 Saudi Arabia was officially listed by the State Department as trafficking in women for sexual exploitation and domestic servitude.
The National Enquirer was originally a serious abolitionist newspaper, not the sensationalist tabloid it became in modern times.
Lincoln presciently wrote this statement in 1858, for he would be assassinated on April 14, 1865, eight months prior to the final ratification of the 13th Amendment.
The issue of slavery which had been suppressed in Congress for the first decades of the nation broke out when Missouri was considered for statehood. 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 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.
Although some Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia maintained legal slavery into the 1960s, Tunisia’s Emancipation pre-dated that of the United States.
Roger Nash Baldwin was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He served as executive director of the ACLU until 1950.
