United States or Tajikistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The equivalent for this privilege provided by the constitution is that the slaveholders shall bear a heavier burden of all direct taxation. But, by the ascendency which their excess of representation gives them in the enactment of laws, they have invariably in time of peace excluded all direct taxation, and thereby enjoyed their excess of representation without any equivalent whatever.
After remaining in New Bedford for three years, I met with William Lloyd Garrison, a person of whom you have possibly heard, as he is pretty generally known among slaveholders. He put it into my head that I might make myself serviceable to the cause of the slave, by devoting a portion of my time to telling my own sorrows, and those of other slaves, which had come under my observation.
Dear fellows! they are all in comfortable beds, and are sound asleep, perfectly secure under my own roof. There are no slaveholders here to rend my heart by snatching them from my arms, or blast a mother's dearest hopes by tearing them from her bosom.
"A very intelligent lady the widow of a highly respectable preacher of the gospel of the Presbyterian Church, formerly a resident of a free state, and a colonizationist, and a strong antiabolitionist, who, although an enemy to slavery, was opposed to abolition on the ground that it was for carrying things too rapidly, and without regard to circumstances, and especially who believed that abolitionists exaggerated with regard to the evils of slavery, and used to say that such men ought to go to slave states and see for themselves, to be convinced that they did the slaveholders injustice, has gone and seen for herself.
It all depends on the mere physical fact of your being in a new country, and we in an old one: and as for moral superiority, I shan't believe in that while I see the whole of the northern states so utterly given up to the 'almighty dollar, that they leave the honour of their country to be made ducks and drakes of by a few southern slaveholders. Moral superiority?
This will be seen by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of their beginning. Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation.
If every abolitionist North of Mason and Dixon's line, were separately and individually asked, from whence he derived his opinions and prejudices in relation to Southern men, and Southern slavery, nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand would answer, that they had learned all that they knew about slavery and slaveholders from the publication of abolitionists: not one in a thousand among them having ever seen a southern slave or his master.
This they kept from me for a time, but Elsie's heart refused to be quieted, and she finally told me about it, first telling her husband she believed it their duty "For," she says, "I have thought more about it since Aunt Laura told me she dreamed of three poisonous green vipers which she poked so near the fire that their sacks were burned to a crisp and the poison all ran out, so that she thought them powerless for harm, but they still kept their threatening attitude; and who knows but these vipers may be slaveholders?"
He was only a slaveholder by marriage-right; and, of all slaveholders, these latter are, by far, the most exacting. There was in him all the love of domination, the pride of mastery, and the swagger of authority, but his rule lacked the vital element of consistency. He could be cruel; but his methods of showing it were cowardly, and evinced his meanness rather than his spirit.
Before the slaves had learned more than to spell words of two or three syllables other masters became unduly alarmed, thinking that such instruction would make the slaves discontented. The timorous element threatened the teachers with the terrors of the law, induced the benevolent slaveholders to prohibit the attendance of their Negroes, and had the school closed.
Word Of The Day