Historical voices

It was unpopular for its very fidelity to the cause of liberty and justice.

Anti-slavery thus far had only been sheet lightning; the Buffalo convention sought to make it a thunderbolt.

It was a vast and variegated assemblage, composed of persons from all sections of the North, and may be said to have formed a new departure in the history of forces organized to resist the growing and aggressive demands of slavery and the…

Had some men made such display of rigid virtue, I should have rejected it, as affected, false and hypocritical, but in John Brown, I felt it to be real as iron or granite.

Slavery was a state of war, and the slave had a right to anything necessary to his freedom.

The true object to be sought is first of all to destroy the money value of slave property; and that can only be done by rendering such property insecure.

No man with the feeling of a parent could be less than moved by such a revelation, and I confess that I was shocked, grieved, and indignant.

The vulgar prejudice against color, so common to Americans, met me in several disagreeable forms.

Men were better than their theology, and truer to humanity, than to their politics, or their offices.

True as a means of destroying slavery, it was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but the thought that there was one less slave, and one more freeman,--having myself been a slave, and a fugitive slave--brought to my…

Secrecy and concealment were necessary conditions to the successful operation of this railroad, and hence its prefix “underground.” My agency was all the more exciting and interesting, because not altogether free from danger.

I was on the southern border of Lake Ontario, and the Queen’s Dominions were right over the way--and my prominence as an abolitionist, and as the editor of an anti-slavery paper, naturally made me the station master and conductor of the…

Outside the years embraced in the late tremendous war, there has been no period, more pregnant with great events, or better suited to call out the best mental and moral energies of men, than that covered by these lost volumes.

While there was nothing very profound or learned in either, the low estimate of Negro possibilities induced the belief that both my editorials and my speeches were written by white persons.

I found it hard to get credit in some quarters either for what I wrote or what I said.

There is nothing like the lash and sting of necessity to make a man work, and my paper furnished this motive power.

I had an audience to speak to every week, and must say something worth their hearing, or cease to speak altogether.

Besides it made it necessary for me to lean upon myself, and not upon the heads of our Anti-Slavery church.

It obliged me to think and read, it taught me to express my thoughts clearly, and was perhaps better than any other course I could have adopted.

But looking back to those nights and days of toil and thought, compelled often to do work for which I had no educational preparation, I have come to think that, under the circumstances it was the best school possible for me.

If in these lectures I did not make abolitionists I did succeed in making tolerant the moral atmosphere in Rochester; so much so, indeed, that I came to feel as much at home there as I had ever done in the most friendly parts of New…

But for the responsibility of conducting a public journal, and the necessity imposed upon me of meeting opposite views from abolitionists outside of New England, I should in all probability have remained firm in my disunion views.

To those with whom I had been in agreement and in sympathy, I came to be in opposition.

This radical change in my opinions produced a corresponding change in my action.