Then Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and all who signed that instrument, and all who joined in the Revolutionary struggle, were deceivers in asserting it to be a self-evident truth, that all men are endowed by…
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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By the Declaration of Independence, he is pronounced a man-stealer.
He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death." So reads the Mosaic code, and by it every American Slaveholder is convicted of a capital crime.
Oppression is not a matter of latitude or longitude; here excusable, there to be execrated; here to elevate the oppressor to the highest station, there to hang him by the neck till he is dead; here compatible with Christianity, there to be…
The act, in both cases, is essentially the same--equally inhuman, immoral, piratical.
How is it that I am a madman, and you are perfectly rational?
What you demand for yourselves, in virtue of your manhood, I demand for the enslaved at the South, on the same ground.
If slaveholding is not wrong under all circumstances, why have you decreed it to be so, within the limits of your State jurisdiction?
Why is it not as easy to buy, breed, inherit, and make slaves in this State, compatible with benevolence, justice, and right, as it is in Carolina or Georgia?
Why do you make slaveholding unlawful among yourselves?
Certainly, not on the ground of expediency, but of principle.
Why, citizens of the Empire State, did you proclaim liberty to all in bondage on your soil, in 1827, and forevermore?