 | Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance
prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an
organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons
nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass, speech delivered on the twenty-fourth anniversary
of Emancipation in the District of Columbia,
April 1886 |
| A slave family was "driven in from the country, like swine for market.
A poor wench clung to a little daughter and implored, with the most
agonizing supplication, that they must not be separated. But alas, either
the master or circumstances were inexorablethey were sold to different
purchasers. The husband and the residue of the family were knocked off
to the highest bidder."
Elkanah Watson, description of a slave auction in Wilmington,
North Carolina, 1778, in his Memoirs |
| Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Where flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate,
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was the soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
Phillis Wheatley,
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1773 |
| "And we do hereby, by virtue of an Act of Assembly of this Province
concerning Servants and Slaves, intimate and declare, if the said Jem does
not surrender himself, and return home immediately after the
Publication of these Presents, that any Person or Persons may kill and
destroy said Slave, by such means as he or they shall think fit ... without
incurring any Penalty or Forfeiture thereby."
Proclamation by two justices of the Craven County Court concerning a
slave named Jem, believed to be "lurking about" his home plantation,
North Carolina Gazette (New Bern), 12 May 1775 |
| [Five slave] "conspirators, after their master was abed, went up to his
room and with an handkerchief attempted to strangle him, which they
thought they had effected, but in a little time after they left him, he
recovered, and began to stir, on hearing which they went up and told him
he must die, and that before they left the room; he begged very earnestly
for his life, but one of them, his house wench, told him it was in vain,
that as he had no mercy on them, he could expect none himself, and
immediately threw him between two feather beds, and all got on him till
he was stifled to death."
An account of the murder of a wealthy Beaufort County slaveholder,
Henry Ormond, which occurred sometime in July 1770, Virginia
Gazette (Rind), 6 September 1770 |
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