Historical voices

They are, therefore, rapidly sinking all other questions to nothing, compared with the increasing demands of slavery.

Its great head for the present is President Pierce, whose boast it was, before his election, that his whole life had been consistent with the interests of slavery, that he is above reproach on that score.

For the present, the best representative of the slavery party in politics is the democratic party.

Like is finding its like on either side of these great issues, and the great battle is at hand.

In their magnitude, these issues cast all others into the shade, depriving them of all life and vitality.

We ought to know who our enemies are, where they are, and what are their objects and measures.

That party, sir, has determined upon a fixed, definite, and comprehensive policy toward the whole colored population of the United States.

I doubt if there be another nation on the globe having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book.

In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this fugitive slave law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical…

Let it be thundered around the world, that, in tyrant-killing, king hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their office under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound…

The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side, and that side is the side of the oppressor.

The oath of an(sic) two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery!

The fugitive slave law makes MERCY TO THEM A CRIME; and bribes the judge who tries them.

For black men there are neither law, justice, humanity, nor religion.

The right of the hunter to his prey, stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included!

Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime.

By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril.

The power is coextensive with the star-spangled banner and American christianity.

By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves, remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of…

By an act of the American congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form.

There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice, and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men.

In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the south; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like…

Fellow citizens, this murderous traffic is to-day in active operation in this boasted republic.

Yet this is but a glance at the American slave trade, as it exists at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.