Historical voices

In consideration of these facts, I feel that I have a right to speak, and to speak strongly.

I shall make use of you as a means of exposing the character of the American church and clergy—and as a means of bringing this guilty nation, with yourself, to repentance.

I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery—as a means of concentrating public attention on the system, and deepening the horror of trafficking in the souls and bodies of men.

Oh! the vocabulary of the damned would not afford a word sufficiently infernal to express your idea of my God-provoking wickedness.

It is an outrage upon the soul, a war upon the immortal spirit, and one for which you must give account at the bar of our common Father and Creator.

You have kept them in utter ignorance, and have therefore robbed them of the sweet enjoyments of writing or receiving letters from absent friends and relatives.

Oh! she was to me a mother and a father, so far as hard toil for my comfort could make her such.

I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip; the death-like gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman; the appalling liability of his being torn away from wife and children, and sold like a beast in the market.

The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me; the wails of millions pierce my heart and chill my blood.

Oh! sir, a slaveholder never appears to me so completely an agent of hell, as when I think of and look upon my dear children.

These dear children are ours—not to work up into rice, sugar, and tobacco, but to watch over, regard, and protect, and to rear them up in the nurture and admonition of the gospel—to train them up in the paths of wisdom and virtue, and, as…

There are no slaveholders here to rend my heart by snatching them from my arms, or blast a mother’s dearest hopes by tearing them from her bosom.

The transition from degradation to respectability was indeed great, and to get from one to the other without carrying some marks of one’s former condition, is truly a difficult matter.

I therefore made an effort so to improve my mind and deportment, as to be somewhat fitted to the station to which I seemed almost providentially called.

Much of my early dislike of white persons was removed, and their manners, habits, and customs, so entirely unlike what I had been used to in the kitchen-quarters on the plantations of the south, fairly charmed me, and gave me a strong…

For the sake of this, most of us would live on a crust of bread and a cup of cold water.

We want to live in the land of our birth, and to lay our bones by the side of our fathers; and nothing short of an intense love of personal freedom keeps us from the south.

It is not that I love Maryland less, but freedom more.

In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living.

We are distinct persons, and are each equally provided with faculties necessary to our individual existence.

Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours.

I am not by nature bond to you, or you to me.

God created both, and made us separate beings.

The morality of the act I dispose of as follows: I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons.