The north comes to the south, cuts their timber, carries it home, manufactures it, and then brings it back, wrought into a hundred different forms, to be sold to those who would see it rot before their eyes.

Can any man give a reason why Norfolk should not have grown like New York, other than the difference in the institutions of the people?

Out of universal education come genius, skill, and enterprise, and the desire of bettering one’s condition.

The aged and the infant she left for the vultures; but the strong men and the strong women she drove, scourged and bleeding, to the shore.

Packed and stowed like merchandise between unventilated decks, so close that the tempest without could not ruffle the pestilential air within, the voyage was begun.

Once a day the hatches were opened, to receive food and to disgorge the dead.

The institution of slavery is against natural right.

Whoever intercepts knowledge, therefore, on its passage to a human soul; whoever strikes down the hand that is outstretched to grasp it, is guilty of one of the most heinous of offences.

So far as legal rights against his oppressors are concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness.

The wickedest white man, in a company of slaves, bears a charmed life.

And yet, infinitely flagrant as the anomaly is, the slave is amenable to the laws of the land for all offences which he may commit against others, though he is powerless to protect himself by the same law from offences which others may…

This is the reciprocity of slave law.--to be forever liable to be proved guilty, but never able to prove himself innocent; to be subject to all punishments, but, through his own oath, to no protection.

What rights are more sacred or more dear to us than the conjugal and the parental?

It is only in the land of slaves that they are blotted out and annihilated.

Slavery is an unspeakable wrong to the conscience.

Mere knowledge, without the moral sense, can take no cognizance of the everlasting distinctions between right and wrong; and so the blind instinct, unguided by knowledge, will be forever at fault in its conclusions.

But the impious hand of man divorces these twin capacities, wherever it denies knowledge.

The dearest and most precious of all human rights is the right of private judgment in matters of religion.

Yet, by denying education to the slave, you destroy not merely the right, but the power, of personal examination in regard to all that most nearly concerns the soul’s interests.

Here the two systems have worked side by side for ages, under such equal circumstances, both political and physical, and with such ample time and opportunity for each to work out its proper effects, that all must admit the experiment to be…

No man of common sense, who has observed this result, can doubt for a moment that the system of free labor promotes the growth and prosperity of states in a much higher degree than the system of slave labor.

Even cold, barren New England, though more than twice as thickly peopled, grew in population at a faster rate than these old slave states.

Old Virginia was the first to sow this land of ours with slavery; she is also the first to reap the full harvest of destruction.

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.