Best slavery & southern Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace - the handcuff, the last - the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives - the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart - these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave's experience.”

Source: Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839

“Slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom; it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of republicanism; it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters.”

Literature Interest Principles Influence Letters Slavery Profession Curse Southern Honorable Clinging Libel Christendom Republicanism Travesty

Book:Ante-bellum writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on slavery

Source: Ante-bellum writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on slavery

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

States Desire Pieces Economic Slavery Southern Humbug

Author:Charles Dickens

“If we want to understand the actions of a man in the early 1860's, put yourself back there in his shoes. As a young man he began piloting steamboats on the Mississippi, a job he loved and wanted to do the rest of his life, he said. The Civil War ended traffic on the River and his job. He wrote about it in A History of A Campaign That Failed. He said: "I joined the Confederacy, served for two weeks, deserted, and the Confederacy fell." His attachment to the Southern ideal of slavery does not appear very sturdy.”

Ifs Men Want Doe Said Two War Action Wanted Jobs Young Week Ideals Rivers Slavery Shoes Campaigns Young Man Civil War Attachment Southern Traffic Two Weeks Mississippi Deserted Sturdy Steamboats

Author:Hal Holbrook

“I can't say with certainty that slavery would have ended more quickly and more completely if the South had been allowed to leave and escaped former slaves had been allowed to remain free, and the North and the rest of the world had been a positive influence on the South. However, it's certainly a possibility that it would have ended sooner if the southern slave owners had agreed to a system of compensated emancipation and freed the slaves without a war and without secession, as most nations that ended slavery did. That absolutely would have been preferable to the Civil War as it happened.”

Ifs World Has Beens I Can War Nations Happened Influence Possibility Slavery Slave South Certainty Former Civil War Owners Southern Emancipation Secession Positive Influence Slave Owners

Author:David Swanson

“In studying food, you embrace everything. Food exposes the long, complex history of the South - slavery, Jim Crow segregation, class struggle, extreme hunger, sexism, and disenfranchisement. These issues are revealed through food encounters, and they contrast this with the pleasure and the inventiveness of Southern cuisine. Food is always at the heart of daily life in the South.”

Heart Long Pleasure Struggle Study Slavery Embrace Hunger Daily Life Sexism Southern Contrast Segregation Crow Jim Crow Inventiveness

Author:Marcie Cohen Ferris

“The core cuisine of Southern food is established in the plantation South, within the world of slavery. To understand the plantation table, we must understand the relationship of enslaved people to Africa, to historical trauma, and their central role in food production. Their voice is the most poignant, expressive voice in Southern cuisine.”

People World Slavery Historical Trauma Southern Poignant

Author:Marcie Cohen Ferris

“The South is about the abundance, beauty, and richness of Southern culture, but also its dark underside. The history of Southern food reflects the history of slavery, of poverty, of the negotiation of power.”

Culture Dark Poverty Slavery Abundance Southern Negotiation

Author:Marcie Cohen Ferris

“One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”

War Whole Causes Interest Powerful Slavery Unions Slave Population Civil War Southern Peculiar American Civil War Inaugural Address American Slavery Slavery In America

Author:Abraham Lincoln

“The real difference of interests, lay not between large and small, but between the Northern and Southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed a line of discrimination.”

Real States Interest Differences Lines Consequence Institutions Slavery Lays Discrimination Southern

Book:The Constitution a pro-slavery compact, or, Extracts from the Madison papers, etc

Source: The Constitution a pro-slavery compact, or, Extracts from the Madison papers, etc

“Grant began by expressing a hope that the war would soon be over, and Lee replied by stating that he had for some time been anxious to stop the further effusion of blood, and he trusted that everything would now be done to restore harmony and conciliate the people of the South. He said the emancipation of the Negroes would be no hindrance to the restoring of relations between the two sections of the country, as it would probably not be the desire of the majority of the Southern people to restore slavery then, even if the question were left open to them.”

People Ifs Said Two War Country Done Would Be Desire Left Blood Relation Harmony Slavery Majority South Civil War Grants Southern Anxious Trusted Sections Emancipation Restoring Hindrance

Author:Horace Porter

“I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.”

Source: Democracy in America

“As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.”

Source: German socialist philosophy

“Many Southern Plantation owners were working towards the day when they could convert their investment to more profitable industrial production as had been done in the North, and others felt that freemen who were paid wages would be more efficient than slaves who had no incentive to work. For the present, however, they were stuck with the system they inherited. They felt that a complete and sudden abolition of slavery with no transition period would destroy their economy and leave many of the former slaves to starve - all of which actually happened in due course.”

“If Lincoln's primary goal in the War was not the abolition of slavery but simply to preserve the Union, the question arises: Why did the Union need preserving? Or, more pointedly, why did the Southern states want to secede?”

Ifs Want Needs War States Goal Slavery Unions Arise Primaries Preserves Civil War Southern Abolition Abolition Of Slavery

Author:G. Edward Griffin

“The systematic, wanton, and long continued agitation of the slavery question, with the actual and threatened aggressions of the Northern States and a portion of their people, upon the well-defined constitutional rights of the Southern citizens; the rapid growth and increase, in all the elements of power, of a purely sectional party.”

“I have made some enemies. My enemies in the southern states consisted of those who oppressed the black slave. My enemies in the north are among those who would perpetuate the slavery of the wage workers”

Made States Black Enemy Slavery Slave Workers Southern Oppressed

Author:Albert Parsons

“It is the maintenance of slavery by law in a state, not parallels of latitude, that makes its a southern state; and the absence of this, that makes it a northern state.”

States Law Slavery Absence Southern Parallels Maintenance Latitude

Author:William H. Seward

“The prejudice of the race appears stronger in the States that have abolished slaves than in the States where slavery still exists. White carpenters, white bricklayers, and white painters will not work side by side with the blacks in the North but do it in almost every Southern State.”

Stills War States Sides White Race Prejudice Stronger Slavery Slave Painter Civil War Southern Carpenter Bricklayers

Author:Alexis de Tocqueville

“Slavery has become so engrafted into the policy of the Southern States, that it cannot be eradicated without tearing up by the roots their happiness, tranquillity, and prosperity.”

War States Policy Roots Slavery Prosperity Civil War Southern Tranquillity

Author:William Loughton Smith

“I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen knife and some people she'd like to kill”

People Wells States Next Horror Paper Resources Method Slavery Compare Pens Southern Knives Attempting

Author:Kara Walker

“Like slaves on the sugar plantations of the Antilles, ...the sugar slaves of southern Louisiana had negative birthrates for as long as slavery lasted.”

Long Negative Slavery Slave Southern Sugar Louisiana Plantations

Author:Ned Sublette

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