Cydnor Tompkins

Innocent and unoffending men were murdered in cold blood, houses were consumed with fire, hamlets laid in smoking ruins, homeless and houseless innocents, women and tender children, were driven forth, exposed to the winds and storms of…

The Territory was overrun with desperadoes; ruffians from adjoining States usurped the rights of actual settlers, stuffed ballot-boxes with illegal votes, and elected members of their own lawless bands to the Legislature, to enact laws by…

This time-honored compact was annulled, the barrier between freedom and slavery broken down.

But men whose lives are but a series violations of the dearest rights that God has bestowed on man cannot be expected to be bound by pledges of national faith and national honor.

This bond of national faith, this pledge of national honor, stood in the road of their ambition.

Less than ten years after the annexation of Texas, it was discovered by Southern men that there was a Territory west of Missouri, wherein the peculiar institution of the South could be made profitable; but by a solemn league and covenant…

But despotism is ever restless and grasping; but twenty-five years rolled by--a very short period in the life of a nation--ere Texas was admitted to the Union, that slavery propagandists could have a wider field for their operations.

Men at the North felt that this was a great aggression, a great outrage upon freedom; yet, to give quiet and restore harmony, they submitted, consoled by the national pledge that slavery should be extended no further, and believing that…

But when the gentleman tells us that the non-slaveholders in his State are the most prosperous and the most elevated of mankind, the inquiry is at once presented to the mind, how elevated in the scale of existence can a man be who can…

I will venture the assertion, that there can scarcely be a man found in the State of Ohio, that was born there, who possesses intellect capable of cultivation, that cannot read; while a very large portion of those ignorant men in the slave…

The census report of 1850 shows this important fact: that of the white men in the slave States over twenty-one years of age, there is about one in every twelve that cannot read and write; while in the free States there is only one out of…

The opinions already quoted from many of the wise men of the South go far to demonstrate that the gentleman from Mississippi is entirely mistaken.

He had, no doubt, a vivid idea of the liberty that is enjoyed by non-slaveholders in the South, when he remembered that these cruelties and barbarities were inflicted on him for expressing a rational and honest opinion relative to this…

The assertion is frequently made, that white men cannot work in the hot latitudes of the South, and this is offered as a reason why there should be black slaves there.

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…

Chairman, that God's sun does not shine upon a nobler, prouder, more prosperous, and elevated class of people, than the non-slaveholders of the South.

The lust of power and dominion deadens their consciences; a million bales of cotton can blind their eyes alike to the flames of perdition and the glories of Paradise.

Slavery had then existed in this country more than two hundred years, yet scarce a man could be then found so bold and so reckless as to proclaim it just and righteous, a humane, a Christian institution.

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.

Labor of every species is disreputable, because performed mostly by slaves; the general aspect of the country marks the curse of a wasteful, idle, reckless population, who have no interest in the soil, and care not how much it is…

It is ruinous to the whites; retards improvement; roots out an industrious population; banishes the yeomanry of the country; deprives the spinner, the weaver, the smith, the shoemaker, the carpenter, of employment and support.

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.

If slave labor, then, is profitable, slaveholding is equitable.

Was it a mere speculation, a wild fancy, that the framers of the Constitution would not admit that there could be such a thing as property in man?

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free.