I do not understand the moral code of those who, screaming in agony at the thought of Nebraska becoming a Slave Territory, virtually say to the South: "Only desist from your present designs, and we will leave you to flog, and lacerate, and…
William Lloyd Garrison
The Public Record
William Lloyd Garrison was an American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. His widely read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator was a driving force that fueled the abolitionist era, which Garrison founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. He supported the rights of women, and during the 1870s became a prominent voice for the women's suffrage movement.
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I would as soon turn pirate on the high seas as to give my consent to any such arrangement.
With a glow of moral indignation, I protest against the promise and the pledge, by whomsoever made, that if the Slave Power will seek no more to lengthen its cords and strengthen its stakes, it may go unmolested end unchallenged, and…
The argument for non-extension is an argument for the dissolution of the Union.
If the Lord be God, serve Him; but if Baal, then serve him." The South may well laugh to scorn the affected moral sensibility of the North against the extension of her slave system.
Thou that sayest, A man should not steal, dost thou steal," or consent, in any instance, to stealing?
Would it not be the acme of effrontery for a man, in amicable alliance with fifteen pickpockets, to profess scruples of conscience in regard to admitting another pilfering rogue to the fraternity?
If it would be a damning sin for us to admit another Slave State into the Union, why is it not a damning sin to permit a Slave State to remain in the Union?
If men, under the American Constitution, may hold slaves at discretion and without dishonour in one-half of the country, why not in the whole of it?
Why should not Nebraska be cultivated by Slave labour, as well as Florida or Texas?
Why should not the star-spangled banner wave over ten, as well as over three millions of Slaves?
Why should there not be twenty, thirty, fifty Slave States, as well as fifteen?