Historical voices

The rich planter can afford to learn politics in the parlor, and to dispense with religion altogether.

The politician keeps away, because the people have no votes, and the preacher keeps away, because the people have no money.

The poor have the gospel preached to them, in this neighborhood, only when they are able to pay for it.

One class of the population is too high to be reached by the preacher; and the other class is too low to be cared for by the preacher.

There are no conflicting rights of property, for all the people are owned by one man; and they can themselves own no property.

The overseer is generally accuser, judge, jury, advocate and executioner.

That plantation is a little nation of its own, having its own language, its own rules, regulations and customs.

To be a restraint upon cruelty and vice, public opinion must emanate from a humane and virtuous community.

Public opinion seldom differs very widely from public practice.

Not even commerce, selfish and iron-hearted at it is, and ready, as it ever is, to side with the strong against the weak—the rich against the poor—is trusted or permitted within its secluded precincts.

Its whole public is made up of, and divided into, three classes—SLAVEHOLDERS, SLAVES and OVERSEERS.

Her grave is, as the grave of the dead at sea, unmarked, and without stone or stake.

It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.

There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery.

The slave-woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master.

Women—white women, I mean—are IDOLS at the south, not WIVES, for the slave women are preferred in many instances; and if these idols but nod, or lift a finger, woe to the poor victim: kicks, cuffs and stripes are sure to follow.

She hates its very presence, and when a slaveholding woman hates, she wants not means to give that hate telling effect.

Men do not love those who remind them of their sins unless they have a mind to repent—and the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child.

A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnanimity.

This arrangement admits of the greatest license to brutal slaveholders, and their profligate sons, brothers, relations and friends, and gives to the pleasure of sin, the additional attraction of profit.

Indeed, I now have reason to think he was not; nevertheless, the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that, by the laws of slavery, children, in all cases, are reduced to the condition of their mothers.

Summoned away to her account, with the impassable gulf of slavery between us during her entire illness, my mother died without leaving me a single intimation of who my father was.

It has been a life-long, standing grief to me, that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated from her.

Scenes of sacred tenderness, around the death-bed, never forgotten, and which often arrest the vicious and confirm the virtuous during life, must be looked for among the free, though they sometimes occur among the slaves.