Bernardo Monteagudo Quotes
Your longed-for liberty cannot be decreed right away, as humanity and reason would wish, because unfortunately it stands in opposition to the sacred right of individual liberty of slaveholders in their property rights.
The political conflict between the right of the slave to liberty and the right of the slave owner to his property made the immediate abolition of slavery very difficult after the Spanish had been overthrown in South America.
Bernardo Monteagudo, 1787-1825, Argentinean Newspaper Publisher and Revolutionary Against Spain, Minister of War and the Navy of Argentina, Protector of Peru, Statement to Brazilian Slaves, Quoted by Adam Zamoyski in “Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1781
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Even before we had a Constitution there was major opposition to slavery. The “price” of the American Union was the acceptance of the slavery of the South. But the hypocrisy of a country based on liberty to allow and enforce slavery was not lost on the founding fathers. Ironically the abolitionists among the founding fathers were certain that they could persuade the Southern slaveholders of the error of slavery in a few years and things would be set right in the land. Even George Washington {630626}, and Thomas Jefferson and some other slaveowners at the time wished to see its abolition. Slaveholding Southern Founding Fathers in general were so wary of the abolitionists that they achieved structural, disproportionate, power in the new Constitution to ward off the abolitionists attempts to reform slavery.
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.
What was particularly interesting about this quotation is that Pinkney was a political leader of Maryland, a slave state. He saw the injustice and immorality of slavery but like many others of our founding fathers assumed that ending slavery would infringe on the property rights of the slave holders. Others argued that there can be no right to deny others their basic rights—property and wealth are subordinate to natural rights. See {632258} and {632259} for more on this point.
Jefferson was an enigma with respect to slavery. Whereas he always abhorred it in his writings, and argued for an end to slavery, he maintained slaves himself and never did free them, unlike Washington, who spoke on the subject much less, but left orders in his will that all slaves were to be set free.
Baron Brougham and Vaux
Negotiations regarding the exchange of prisoners and property. This was his view of his supposed obligation to return Negro slaves who had escaped and gone to the British during the war. The treaty of peace specified that all “property” including slaves, taken by, the British be returned to the Americans. But he and other officers did not always do so as they thought they had higher moral obligations. See {621936} for example.
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 an entertainer she had toured much of the world and seen American slavery and that of some other nations. She became a staunch abolitionist and like entertainers in the 20th and 21st centuries she used her celebrity to give anti-slavery lectures and perform for audiences where she donated the proceeds of the event to the abolition cause. She is a particularly interesting political figure in that she seems to be one of the first entertainers to perform for a social cause and become an activist.
The Czar of Russia was often referred to as “The Autocrat of all the Russians” He was the most entrenched and powerful monarch in the world with absolutely no possibility of his giving up his crown and power. That was the analogy that Lincoln used here to express his pessimistic view that the Southern slave owners would never voluntarily give up their slaves. He was right of course in both cases. Force during and after the Civil War freed the slaves, and the 1917 Russian Revolution ended the Czar’s reign.
