We see our free coloured citizens incarcerated in Southern prisons, or sold on the auction-block, for no other crime than that of being found on Southern soil; and we dare not call for redress.
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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No insult or outrage, no deed of impiety or blood, on the part of the South, can startle us into resistance, or inspire us with self-respect.
There is no North." A sordid, truckling, cowardly, compromising spirit, is everywhere seen.
If such a spirit of manly indignation and unbending integrity pervaded the Northern breast, how long could Slavery stand before it?
I cannot talk of toleration, because it supposes that a boon has been given to a human being, in allowing him to have his conscience free.
It is odious and insolent to interfere between a man and his God; to fetter with law the choice which the conscience makes of its mode of adoring the eternal and adorable God.
He may have business with you, and the less you do with him the better; but the moment that is over, turn from him as if he had the cholera or the plague--for there is a moral cholera and a political plague upon him.
Put not on the list of your friends, nor allow admission to your domestic circle, the man who on principle defends Slavery, but treat him as a moral leper.
The truth is, complete justice has never been asked for the enslaved.
No compensation whatever for their past unrequited toil; no redress for their multitudinous wrongs; no settlement for sundered ties, bleeding backs, countless lacerations, darkened intellects, ruined souls!
What! is it going too far to ask, for those who have been outraged and plundered all their lives long, nothing but houseless, penniless, naked freedom!
The issue is not with me, but with them, and with God.