Chattel Slavery Quotes

Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.

There was a uniqueness to the American case of slavery. 10 million people, a conservative estimate, were brought to America... hundreds of people were set up in work camps, and hereditary-forced labor was put in place. That's a very different thing than the personal slavery that existed elsewhere.

Slavery was not one thing, it was many different things. It was different in cities than in the countryside. It was different on plantations than on farms. And in the 19th century slavery was changing rapidly. At the beginning of the 19th century most slaves grew rice or tobacco. At the end of slavery in 1863 most slaves were growing cotton

Whereas, the plantations and estates of this Province cannot be well and sufficiently managed and brought into use without the labor and service of negroes and other slaves …

More generally, independent farmers had to be trained to become docile workers in the expanding industrial system. It was necessary to drive from their heads evil ideas, such as the belief that wage labor was not much different from chattel slavery. That continues to the present, now sometimes taking the form of an attack on public education.

Slaves were at one and the same time investments (purchased and then rented out as laborers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital.

I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.

Slavery was incredibly prosperous for some people, at that time. It was not a bad business plan, but it was terrible and inhumane. But as a business it worked.

Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.

And there is no difference, in principle - but only in degree - between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.

The horseman serves the horse, The neat-herd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind, Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

I should have done violence to my convictions of duty, had I not made use of all the lawful means in my power to liberate those people, and assist them to become men and women, rather than leave them in the condition of chattels personal.

While boasting of our noble deeds we’re careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.