Historical voices

Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun, can you witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking.

Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers.

They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill.

Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave trade—the American slave trade sustained by American politics and American religion!

It is, however, a notable fact, that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans, upon those engaged in the foreign slave trade, the men engaged in the slave trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business…

Everywhere in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave trade as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the laws of God and of man.

There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?

The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and…

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.

Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would to-day pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.

Must I argue that a system, thus marked with blood and stained with pollution, is wrong?

There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race.

When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the…

There are seventy-two crimes in the state of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to the like…

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting.

Standing there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July.

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are to-day rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them.

And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin!

Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?