If, then, the slaves have been robbed of their liberty, who has robbed them?
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
Not the man who stole their forefathers from Africa, but he who now holds them in bondage; no matter how they came into his possession, whether he inherited them, or bought them, or seized them at their birth on his own plantation.
The only difference I can see between the original man-stealer, who caught the African in his native country, and the American slaveholder, is, that the former committed one act of robbery, while the other perpetrates the same crime…
Slaveholding is the perpetrating of acts, all of the same kind, in a series, the first of which is technically called man-stealing.
The first act robbed the man of himself; and the same state of mind that prompted that act, keeps up the series, having taken his all from him: it keeps his all from him, not only refusing to restore, but still robbing him of all he gets…
Slaveholding, then, is the constant or habitual perpetration of the act of man-stealing.
To make a slave is man-stealing--the ACT itself--to hold him such is man-stealing--the habit, the permanent state, made up of individual acts.
In other words--to begin to hold a slave is man-stealing--to keep on holding him is merely a repetition of the first act--a doing the same identical thing all the time.
If every slave has a right to freedom, then surely the man who withholds that right from him to-day is a man-stealer, though he may not be the first person who has robbed him of it.
Now, our measures are simply the carrying out of our principles; and we find, that just in proportion as individuals embrace our principles, in spirit and in truth, they cease to cavil at our measures.
Real Abolitionists know full well, that the slave never has been, and never can be, a whit the better for mere abstractions, floating in the head of any man; and they also know, that principles, fixed in the heart, are things of another…
The great fundamental principle of Abolitionists is, that man cannot rightfully hold his fellow man as property.