William Lloyd Garrison: “If slaveholding is not wrong under all circumstances, why have you decreed it to be so, within the limits of your State…”

Whether it be personal or political, mental or corporeal, intellectual or spiritual, I am for its instant, its total Abolition.

A million of slaves were ready to rise and strike for freedom at the first tap of the drum.

They who desire me to be dumb on the subject of Slavery, unless I will open my mouth in its defence, ask me to give the lie to my professions, to degrade my manhood, and to stain my soul.

It is only when we come to the dividing line between the Free States and the Slave States that shoals, breakers and whirlpools beset the ship of State, and threaten to engulf or strand it.