On the record
The Constitution of the United States nowhere recognises slaves as property.
Source
gutenberg.orgEditor's note · Context
Tompkins asserts that the U.S. Constitution does not recognize slaves as property, challenging the legal status of slavery.
Share
More from Cydnor Tompkins
Thomas Jefferson tells us that man is an imitative animal; therefore, if the assertion of the gentleman from Mississippi be correct, we must wonder why slaveholders do not relieve themselves of their negroes, that they may become equally…
I charge them as direct, positive aggressions, on the rights of the free people of the North.
Thus it is decided, that whatever is profitable is also equitable: justice and injustice are mere matters of profit and loss; the morality or immorality of slavery a mere question of soil and climate.
I believe that no cancer on the physical body was ever more certain, steady, and fatal, in its progress, than is the cancer of slavery on the political body of the State of Virginia.
Other voices in this conversation
