Abolition of Slavery Quotes
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.
Washington was from Virginia, the largest of the slave states, and he himself owned slaves. In his will he emancipated all his slaves. Most of his fellow Southern Slave owners however not only disagreed about the abolition of slavery but were adamant that slavery spread so that the abolitionists never attain a majority.
As late as 2005 Saudi Arabia was officially listed by the State Department as trafficking in women for sexual exploitation and domestic servitude.
The slavery issue was the dominant issue in pre-Civil War America. It even drove foreign policy.
Churchill saw the American Civil War as inevitable as it placed two huge forces in opposition. The moral force to eliminate slavery was up against the economic force of the entire Southern economy. The Southern slaves were worth more than all the factories, railroads, stores, real estate, farms and goods of the entire South. If slavery ended, the upper class Southerners would all be economically ruined. If slavery did not end, the United States would contain the most evil and immoral institution then known to the world.
This remarkable quotation shows that this great Southern leader, 15 years before the Civil War, publicly stated that the institution of slavery was doomed to extinction. As such it was not worth worrying about in such issues as new territories of the Union and other more important and long lasting things. This quotation however is not commonly cited.
Lincoln had promised amnesty to Southerners who would pledge loyalty to the Union. What many feared was that this would include slave owners re-enslaving their former "property," or that the government would allow them to do so in order to stop the rebellion.
In what turned out to be a tragic prediction of things to come:
English law required equal citizenship for Blacks. However, the Affrikaners—white settlers from Holland were totally opposed. It turned out to be impossible for the English to impose their law upon all of South Africa.
One of the many complaints that many people made at the time about Smith and his Mormons was that they opposed slavery. In fact, Smith not only opposed it be had a plan for compensating the slave owner and a method for paying for it. Smith was not advocating the kinds of personal lifestyle issues of his church the way modern religious leaders do, but was concerned with the much larger issues of expansionism, corruption of the courts and judiciary, and land distribution. He was a classic reform candidate in that sense. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.
Lincoln was then a Whig campaigning for his party.
Van Buren was Ambassador to England at the time.
