Abolition Movement Quotes

Within Western civilization, the principal impetus for the abolition of slavery came first from very conservative religious activists – people who would today be called “the religious right.” Clearly, this story is not “politically correct” in today’s terms. Hence it is ignored, as if it never happened.

The abolitionists were looked upon as the radicals and militants of their time.

After the Civil war, everybody in retrospect claimed to be an abolitionist. It’s amazing that slavery survived so long when there were so many abolitionists.

I never was an Abolitionist, not even what could be called anti slavery, but I try to judge fairly & honestly and it become patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery.

I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist.

Force sometimes does change things. I see not reason to believe that slavery in America would not have continued to the present day if it did not meet a violent end.

No more slave States; no slave Territories.

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.

Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties.

The gentleman asks, when were the colonies emancipated? But I desire to know, when were they made slaves

The end and aim of this publication is the gradual, though total, abolition of slavery in the United States of America

There are Abolitionists among us fully capable of organizing a military crusade, and of stirring up a servile insurrection in the Southern States.

Should slavery be abolished there, (and it is an event, which, from these circumstances, we may reasonably expect to be produced in time) let it be remembered, that the Quakers will have had the merit of its abolition.

There were thousands of abolitionists who were free traders.

I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.

When people think of slavery, they think of an era from the distant past. Grainy photographs from Civil War times. And yet it goes on.

The real difference of interests, lay not between large and small, but between the Northern and Southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed a line of discrimination.

Born a slave, Harriet Tubman was determined not to remain one. She escaped from her owners in Maryland on the Underground Railroad in 1849 and then fearlessly returned thirteen times to help guide family members and others to freedom as the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad.

In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage - often on religious grounds.

The movement to abolish the death penalty needs the religious community because the heart of religion is about compassion, human rights, and the indivisible dignity of each human person made in the image of God.

Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being the first one out.

Your paper is now a power in the land. Advocate calling together in every church and schoolhouse in the free states all the opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, no matter what their previous party affiliations and to band together under the name I suggested to you ... in 1852. I mean the name "Republican.

In such a condition of affairs, the practical difference between the abolitionist and the sympathizer, to the man who lost his slave and could not recover it, was very nebulous.

With abolition, it's necessary to destroy systems of oppression. But it's equally necessary to put at the forefront our conversations about creation. When we fight for justice, what exactly do we want for our communities?

The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.