Hendrick van Reede Quotes
…these poor men…who are bound, not only for all their lives, but for those of their children.
Hendrick van Reede, ~1637-1691, Commissioner General, Dutch East India Co, Statement about Capetown slaves, 1685
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Southern secession and the Civil War This is one of the major quotations with which historians rebut the revisionist view that the Civil War was about States’ Rights or other economic factors.
White Africaners were slaughtering Blacks to appropriate their land in violation of English law. See {583901} for a related quotation.
The “lords of the lash” were the Southern slave owners. The “lords of the loom” were the Northern mill owners. The Southern cotton, grown by cheap slave labor was sold to the Northern mill owners at very low prices. They in turn wove the cotton into cloth and sold it throughout the nation and to foreign countries. So, although there was strong Northern anti-slavery sentiment, the wealthy and politically powerful mill owners had a vested interest in maintaining slavery in the South.
The language was removed in the negotiations that followed Jefferson's draft.
As a result of the programs and philosophy he expounded, Leontiev joyously predicted:
The Chinese laborers were slaves by most definitions of the word as they had been brought to South Africa on a system of indentured servitude. Slavery was illegal so the term had all kinds of political and legal significance. His statement was a masterpiece of admitting that it was almost slavery but leaving some wiggle room so as not to have classified it as such. Some use this as an example of Churchill’s capacity for hypocrisy.
Generally, Jefferson was not in favor of whipping slaves, but this quotation shows that he essentially accepted the basic principles of Southern Slavery—including the one that says if the person does not want to work for you, you may whip, beat, or torture him or her to produce “reasonable work.” This acceptance of slavery and profiting from it, is the terrible blot on the record of the man who otherwise was among the few greatest of Americans.
