By no precedent, no example, no law, no compact, no purchase, no bequest, no inheritance, no combination of circumstances, is slaveholding right or justifiable.
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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While a slave remains in his fetters, the land must have no rest.
Whatever sanctions his doom must be pronounced accursed.
The law that makes him a chattel is to be trampled under foot; the compact that is formed at his expense, and cemented with his blood, is null and void; the church that consents to his enslavement is horribly atheistical; the religion that…
Such, at least, is the verdict of my own soul, on the supposition that I am to be the slave; that my wife is to be sold from me for the vilest purposes; that my children are to be torn from my arms, and disposed of to the highest bidder…
What right have I to be free, that another man cannot prove himself to possess by nature?
Who or what are my wife and children, that they should not be herded with four-footed beasts, as well as others thus sacredly related?
Does, then, th' immortal principle within Change with the casual colour of the skin?
Does matter govern spirit? or is mind Degraded by the form to which 'tis joined?
What if I am rich, and another is poor--strong, and he is weak--intelligent, and he is benighted--elevated, and he is depraved?
How rich, how poor, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful is man!
Distinguished link in being's endless chain, Midway from nothing to the Deity!