The present American Union, therefore, is only one in form, not in reality.
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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It is, and it always has been, the absolute supremacy of the Slave Power over the whole country--nothing more.
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.
While the present Union exists, I pronounce it hopeless to expect any repose, or that any barrier can be effectually raised against the extension of Slavery.
The Northwest Territory, Nebraska, Mexico, Cuba, Hayti, the Sandwich Islands, and colonial possessions in the tropics--to seize and subjugate these to its accursed reign, and ultimately to re-establish the foreign Slave Trade as a lawful…
It is not a question of probabilities, but of time.
And whom will a just God hold responsible for all these results?
Let me define my positions, and at the same time challenge any one to show wherein they are untenable.
Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form--and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing--with indignation and abhorrence.
Not to cherish these feelings would be recreancy to principle.
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.
I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together.