“During the time I was engaged in the slave trade, I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness. . . . It is, indeed, accounted a genteel employment and is usually very profitable.” --John Newton, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade , 1787
“Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scare be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!” --Benjamin Franklin, on the Somerset decision
“The years 1765 and 1766 will be ever memorable for the glorious stand which America has made for her liberties; how much glory will it add ... if at the same time we are establishing Liberty for ourselves and children, we show the same regard to all mankind that came among us?” --Nathaniel Appleton, 1767
“Is not a law of nature that all men are equal and free? ... Are not the laws of nature the laws of God? Is not the law of God then against slavery?” --Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling in Quok Walker case, 1783
“Any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman.” --Mum Bet (Elizabeth Freeman), 1781
“How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election of government, more than of air, soil, or climate, for themselves or their children? When, before the present epoch, had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?” --John Adams
“Why should the blacks, who were property in the South, be in their rule of representation more than the cattle and horses of the North?” --Elbridge Gerry (Mass.)
1790 Census of the United States States Free White Other Free Slaves Total VT 85,268 255 16 85,539 NH 141,097 630 158 141,885 ME 96,002 538 0 96,540 MA 373,324 5,463 0 378,787 RI 64,470 3,407 948 68,825 CT 232,674 2,808 2,764 237,946 NY 314,142 4,654 21,324 340,120 NJ 169,954 2,762 11,423 184,139 PA 424,099 6,537 3,737 434,373 DE 46,310 3,899 8,887 59,094 MD 208,649 8,043 103,036 319,728 VA 442,117 12,866 292,627 747,610 KT 61,133 113 12,430 73,677 NC 288,204 4,975 100,572 393,751 SC 140,178 1,801 107,094 249,073 GA 52,886 398 29,262 82,548 TOTAL 3,140,205 59,150 694,280 3,893,635
“Barbary is Hell. So, alas, is all America south of Pennsylvania, for oppression and slavery and misery are here.” -- William Eaton, first American consul to Tunis, writing from Tunis in 1799
“I will fly to our fellow citizens in the southern states; I will on my knees conjure them, in the name of humanity, to abolish a traffic which causes it to bleed in every port. If they are deaf to the pleadings of nature, I will conjure them for the sake of consistency to cease to deprive their fellow creatures of freedom.” --Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive, 1797.
“Upon the decease of my wife, it is my Will & desire that all the Slaves which I hold in my own right , shall receive their freedom.” --Washington’s Will, 1799
Rembrandt Peale, The Apotheosis of Washington , 1800
The Washington Family , Edward Savage, c. 1789-1798
"The situation of the St. Domingo fugitives (aristocrats as they are), calls aloud for pity and charity. Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man." He wrote to Gouvernor Morris, about "the wretched fugitives... who escaping from the swords and flames of civil war, threw themselves on us naked and houseless, without food or friends, money or other means, their faculties lost and absorbed in the depth of distresses." --Thomas Jefferson, 1792, on French planters fleeing to the U.S.
“If Frenchmen...could find in you an apologist for cruel excesses of which the world had furnished no example, -- are the hapless, the wretched Haytians (‘guilty,’ indeed, ‘of a skin not coloured like our own’ but) emancipated , and by a great National Act declared Free... are these men, not merely to be abandoned to their own efforts, but to be deprived of those necessary supplies which . . . they have been accustomed to receive from the UStates, and without which they cannot subsist? . . . And what will be their rights under the law of nations? Seeing [that] we, by an act of Government, take part with their enemies, to reduce them to submission by starving them! Save then your country, Sir, while you may, from such ignominy and thraldom.” --Timothy Pickering to Thomas Jefferson, 1806
The Tumultuous 1790s 1789 Washington inaugurated Congress ratifies Bill of Rights 1790 Congressional debate over Hamilton’s plan 1791 Whiskey Tax passed 1792 Washington and Adams re-elected 1793 Whiskey Rebellion 1793 Louis XVI beheaded in France First Democratic-Republican societies formed 1796 Washington offers his Farewell Address; retires. Adams beats Jefferson, 71-68; Jefferson becomes VP 1798 Adams signs Alien and Sedition Acts
“We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” --Thomas Jefferson, 1820
The House Divided “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free . I do not expect the Union to be dissolved —I do not expect the house to fall —but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” --Abraham Lincoln, 1858
The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world…causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest .” --Lincoln, 1854
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” --The Gettysburg Address, 1863
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