In vain are their sufferings portrayed, their wrongs rehearsed, their rights defended.
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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As Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, so the slaveholding spirit of this nation rejoices, as one barrier of liberty after another is destroyed, and fresh victims are multiplied for the cotton-field and the auction-block.
For one impeachment of the slave system, a thousand defences are made.
For one rebuke of the man-stealer, a thousand denunciations of the Abolitionists are heard.
For one press that bears a faithful testimony against Slavery, a score are ready to be prostituted to its service.
The wealth, the enterprise, the literature, the politics, the religion of the land, are all combined to give extension and perpetuity to the Slave Power.
The two great parties which absorb nearly the whole voting strength of the Republic are pledged to be deaf, dumb and blind to whatever outrages the Slave Power may attempt to perpetrate.
They are as clay in the hands of the potter, and already moulded into vessels of dishonour, to be used for the vilest purposes.
I have expressed the belief that, so lost to all self-respect and all ideas of justice have we become by the corrupting presence of Slavery, in no European nation is personal liberty held at such discount, as a matter of principle, as in…
If they are valid, in any instance, what becomes of the Declaration of Independence?
On what ground can the revolutionary war, can any struggle for liberty, be justified?
I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together.