-- Political Quotations on Slavery

"Slavery....that slow Poison, which is daily contaminating the Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentlemen here is born a petty Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contempitible Degree below us, we lose that idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes."

--George Mason, July, 1773, Virginia Constitutional Convention.
 
"Viewing slavery as I do, I must resist its further propagation on the North American Continent. It is an evil, the magnitude of which, no man can see."

--David Wilmot, Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, in a speech in the House of Representatives, Feb. 8, 1847.
 
"In God's name, gentlemen, what do you mean? Not a man of you believes that slavery is eternal. Not one is stupid enough, notwithstanding his vote, to believe that it can be abolished by convention. You all believe that it is to go out, when it does go, through convulsion, fire, and blood. That convulsion is upon us. The man is a delirlous a s s who does not see and realize this. For me I mean to make a conquest of it; to beat it to extinction under the iron hoofs of our war horses."

--Ohio Congressman Albert G. Riddle, one of the only two representatives to vote against the Crittenden Resolution when asked to change his vote in favor of the resolution.

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"There are now in the slaveholding States over four millions of slaves; dissolve the relation of master and slave, and what, I ask, would become of that race? To remove them from amongst us is impossible.... They therefore must remain with us; and if the relation of master and slave be dissolved and our slaves turned loose amongst us without restraint, they would either be destroyed by our own hands--the hands to which they look, and look with confidence, for protection--or we ourselves would become demoralized and degraded. The former result would take place, and we ourselves would become the executioners of our own slaves."

--Edmund S. Dargan, in a speech to the Secession Convention of Alabama on January 11, 1861, quoted by William R. Smith in The History and Debates of the Convention of the People of Alabama, 1861.
 
"In a moral and social condition, they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction, under the supervision of s superior race."

--Jefferson Davis, in a speech to a special session of the Confederate congress, April 29, 1861.
 
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