I appeal to you, my friends, as mothers; Are you willing to enslave your children?
Angelina Emily Grimké
The Public Record
Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was an American abolitionist, political activist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. At one point she was the best known, or "most notorious," woman in the country. She and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké were considered the only notable examples of white Southern women abolitionists. The sisters lived together as adults, while Angelina was the wife of abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld.
gutenberg.org
Well, I am willing to admit that you who have lived in freedom would find slavery even more oppressive than the poor slave does, but then you may try this question in another form--Am I willing to reduce my little child to slavery?
If not, then in holding others as slaves, I am doing what I would not wish to be done to me or any relative I have; and thus have I broken this golden rule which was given me to walk by.
Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," Let every slaveholder apply these queries to his own heart; Am I willing to be a slave--Am I willing to see my wife the slave of another--Am I willing to see my mother…
If then He did not condemn Jewish servitude this does not prove that he would not have condemned such a monstrous system as that of American slavery, if that had existed among them.
The attributes of justice and mercy are shadowed out in the Hebrew code; those of injustice and cruelty, in the Code Noir of America.
The Code Noir of the South robs the slave of all his rights as a man, reduces him to a chattel personal, and defends the master in the exercise of the most unnatural and unwarrantable power over his slave.
The laws of Moses protected servants in their rights as men and women, guarded them from oppression and defended them from wrong.
What is a trifling fault in the white man, is considered highly criminal--in the slave; the same offences which cost a white man a few dollars only, are punished in the negro with death.
There is in this country a monstrous inequality of law and right.
The whole power of the laws is exerted to keep slaves in a state of the lowest ignorance.
The operation of the laws tends to deprive slaves of religious instruction and consolation.