Slave Rights Quotes
Since a slave was not a person, he/she could not accept any gifts or own any property. They were themselves property. The Greeks, the Romans, the ancient Germans, the Poles, with the Portuguese, the Spanish and the French had provided, both by law and by custom, for the possession of property by the slave, which could, not be seized by his master. This is another sense in which American slavery was even worse than most slavery had been.
The Pennsylvania Society for promoting the Abolition of Slavery had submitted a petition to Congress which refused to consider it, this resolution being the reason.
The other Southern States had similar legal principles while still maintaining the hypocrisy that their legal system was grounded on Christian morality.
Abolition was an issue from the first Congress onward. By the 1850s there was a major, and in the view of the Southern Slavery enthusiasts, incessant political, journalistic, and intellectual attacks on slavery. The latter two really affected public opinion and opposition to slavery grew in intellectual and educated circles. This document was an example of the literature of the time where the attack on slavery was made by simply explaining the “logic and facts” of the existing laws of the slave states. Once exposed in their entirety, the horror and immorality of the institution was supplemented by the intellectual absurdity and logical fallacies of the pro slavery forces. Note the swipe Goodell takes at Congress. This kind of public criticism made it harder and harder for the Northern Congressmen to “go along” with the South on the slavery issue, and the next decade of increased polarization on slavery culminated in the Civil War. It was not the Southern representatives who changed, but consciousness raising and public opinion changed the Northern perspective and the voting of the Northerners to oppose slavery. Earlier “compromises” became no longer morally or politically acceptable.
This may be the first formal resolution against slavery in the Americas. This quotation shows the fact that not only did these Mennonites oppose slavery, and chastise those who bought slaves as much as the slave capturers, but they argued that the slaves had a perfect right to armed struggle to free themselves—the greatest fear of slaveholders in America. The term “negers” was not a word of disrespect but was derived from the low German spoken by the Mennonites.
