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“My master! and who made him my master? That’s what I think of — what right has he to me? I’m a man as much as he is. I’m a better man than he is.
he tied me to a tree, and cut switches for young master, and told him that he might whip me till he was tired; — and he did do it!
“I always thought that I must obey my master and mistress, or I couldn’t be a Christian.”
I can’t trust in God. Why does he let things be so?”
“Don’t you know a slave can’t be married? There is no law in this country for that; I can’t hold you for my wife, if he chooses to part us.
I’ll be free, or I’ll die!”
There was something about his whole air self-respecting and dignified, yet united with a confiding and humble simplicity.
Uncle Tom was a sort of patriarch in religious matters, in the neighborhood.
“This is God’s curse on slavery! — a bitter, bitter, most accursed thing! — a curse to the master and a curse to the slave! I was a fool to think I could make anything good out of such a deadly evil. It is a sin to hold a slave under laws like ours, — I always felt it was, — I always thought so when I was a girl, — I thought so still more after I joined the church; but I thought I could gild it over, — I thought, by kindness, and care, and instruction, I could make the condition of mine better than freedom — fool that I was!”
“Don’t dey tear der suckin’ baby right off his mother’s breast, and sell him, and der little children as is crying and holding on by her clothes, — don’t dey pull ‘em off and sells ‘em? Don’t dey tear wife and husband apart?”
‘This yer young un’s mine, and not yourn, and you’ve no kind o’ business with it. I’m going to sell it, first chance; mind, you don’t cut up none o’ yer shines about it, or I’ll make ye wish ye’d never been born.’
“I’m ready for ‘em! Down south I never will go. No! if it comes to that, I can earn myself at least six feet of free soil, — the first and last I shall ever own in Kentucky!”
Mr. Wilson, you have a country; but what country have I, or any one like me, born of slave mothers? What laws are there for us? We don’t make them, — we don’t consent to them, — we have nothing to do with them; all they do for us is to crush us, and keep us down.
Being black during slavery had to be some ordeal. You can have a wife but she is not yours, childen but they are not yours. At any moment you are either of them can be sold and you have no say in the matter. No matter how kind one may think those that own them, they are property, subject to their will. George had came to this disturbing truth.
slavery always ends in misery.
Slavery is America's deepest shame. As a black man, though my people are no longer brought and sold as slaves, the afermath lingers. For African Americans, our last names are not our true famiky names, nor can we trace our roots back to Africa. Our history has been stolen from us, seperated from the very place we come from having no true native tongue.
There’s a God for you, but is there any for us?”
This was hard saying. The cry of a man at the end of his rope and weary of the cruel world he has come to know. As a Christian, we belive based on the Bible that God is in control, so what happens he allows. That is a hard pill to swallow. However, in the beginning, God gave us a utopia but we riuned it. Therfore, I believe strongly that the sufferings of the world are also part of his judgement on us.
EXECUTOR’S SALE, — NEGROES! — Agreeably to order of court, will be sold, on Tuesday, February 20, before the Court-house door, in the town of Washington, Kentucky, the following negroes: Hagar, aged 60; John, aged 30; Ben, aged 21; Saul, aged 25; Albert, aged 14. Sold for the benefit of the creditors and heirs of the estate of Jesse Blutchford,
Can you imagine that humanbeings were sold with such imimpunity. But for profit an ethnic group was seen as mere objects. Advertised like a clothing sale.
“The most dreadful part of slavery, to my mind, is its outrages on the feelings and affections, — the separating of families,
Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be,’ the scripture says.”
Such a gross misenterpratation of scripture. For one, this curse was fulfilled in the book of Joshua. The curse was on Canaan and not all the descendents of Ham and no skin tone was mentioned. No reputable bible scholar would would disagree. So this error in interprtation was part of the reason christain slave holders saw no evil in their actions. As far as they new, it ws the will of God.
Niggers must be sold, and trucked round, and kept under; it’s what they’s made for.
“O, but nobody thinks anything of these traders! They are universally despised, — never received into any decent society.” But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he? Are you educated and he ignorant, you high and he low, you refined and he coarse, you talented and he simple? In the day of
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Bravo. I know many individuals that read this book in the tme of it's intriducton tonthw world were cut by these words. The buyers and owners were just as guilty as the traders. The same as someone that sold an illegl drug as the one that helped the drug enter the contry. All parties profited while the addict was stuck in the middle. There were no good slave owners, they were clients to a system of a great evil.
