Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Christianity itself is this—temporal, relative—to some extent. To every age Christ dies anew and is resurrected within the imagination of man.”

“you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.”

“whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.”

“There is an enormous contingent of thoughtful people in this country who, though they are frustrated with the language and forms of contemporary American religion, nevertheless feel that burn of being that drives us out of ourselves, that insistent, persistent gravity of the ghost called God.”

“Republicans held their first national convention in June 1856. Its platform denounced the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, branded slavery "a relic of barbarism," held that "all men are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and insisted that the federal government's "primary object" must be "to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction.”

“That party, the new Republican Party, arose first in Wisconsin and Michigan in 1854. In the summer of 1855, Stevens and about a dozen other politically prominent Pennsylvanians set out to launch a unit of the new party in their state. They called upon those who, regardless of "former party distinctions," were now ready to follow them and "unite in a new organization to resist the further spread of slavery." ”

“Determined to take advantage of this historic opportunity, antislavery forces strove to create not merely temporary election tickets but a fully fledged, potent, and durable political party united in hostility to slavery and determined to see it die. The extent and degree of popular outrage in the North for the first time made that party project appear not only necessary but feasible.”

“Slavery's most militant and committed foes recognized in the Kansas-Nebraska uproar a major turning point in political life. For the first time, a very large proportion of northern voters, previously Whig or Democratic in affinity, were now identifying slavery's expansion as the principal issue on which to base voting choices.”

“Stevens could only hope that "the people will ultimately see that laws which oppress the black man, and deprive him of the safeguards of Liberty, will eventually enslave the white man. That he who is but the tyrant of the African to-day will be the tyrant of the Anglo- Saxon hereafter." ”

“Politicians from the free states uphold slavery "to purchase southern support" for their own projects and careers while "commercial communities who think more of a cent a yard profit on coarse cotton than human rights" stand by the slaveholders "to attract southern trade." The public was duped into going along with this by newspapers filled with "habitual falsehoods and perversions of facts."”

“"The course of Liberty is hard to sustain in this republic," he [Stevens] complained to sympathetic Pennsylvania constituents, because our citizens appear unable to "understand why others than themselves should be free." But they should be asking themselves "what stronger right to freedom has the pale than the dark face." ”

“He [Stevens] said, "I honor her [the South] courage and fidelity," because "even in a bad, a wicked cause, she shows a united front. All her sons are faithful to the cause of human bondage," all accept it as "their cause." Unfortunately, he lamented, "the North—the poor, timid, mercenary, driveling North—has no such united defenders of her cause, although it is the cause of human liberty."

“The answer, he said, was to be found in the moral backsliding of the North. Its people, although numerically greater than the South's, had allowed the slaveowners to rule over them. Southern spokesmen proudly boasted of having controlled the federal government throughout most of the country's history.”

“And then, having flayed the slaveholders, Stevens turned his fire on the free states. Why, he asked, had slavery been allowed to survive in the United States so long? And what now enabled this barbaric system to threaten to spread even farther, meanwhile bullying the rest of the nation?”

“Stevens quoted complaints by both Virginia and Alabama congressmen that slavery's restriction to its current domain would lead inevitably to its death there. To Stevens, however, that outcome would be "one of the most agreeable consequences of the legitimate restriction of slavery"; the achievement of "universal freedom" would fulfill "the fondest wishes of every patriotic heart." ”

“But "confine this malady within its present limits. Surround it with a cordon of freemen" so "that it cannot spread, and in less than twenty-five years every slave-holding State in this Union will have on her statute books a law for the gradual and final extinction of slavery."”

“That battle would be an epochal one indeed, not least because all knew that restricting slavery to its present confines would have tremendous consequences. Such restriction would eventually doom bondage even within the states where it now existed. "Let the disease spread, and although it will render the whole body leprous and loathsome, yet it will still survive." ”

“Accepting constitutional guarantees for slavery where it already existed, however, did not and must not require tolerating slavery's further expansion. That, on the contrary, must be stoutly resisted, and Stevens predicted that such resistance would trigger the great battle that loomed ahead between liberty and servitude.”

“The wretched condition of the nation's enslaved subjects marked the country's free white citizens as "despots such as history will brand and God abhors."”

“The American slave, he asserted, was worse off ... For in this country "the subject has no rights, social, political, or personal. He has no voice in the laws which govern him. He can hold no property. His very wife and children are not his His labor is another's.... He is governed, bought, sold, punished, executed, by laws to which he never gave his assent, and by rules whom he never chose.”

“"In my judgment not only the slave States but the General Government, recognizing and aiding as it does slavery, is a despotism." Because "in this Government, the free white citizens" are the sole "rulers," and "all others are subjects." In fact, Stevens continued, those approximately "four millions of subjects lie under the most absolute and grinding despotism that the world ever saw."”

“Stevens explained his meaning. "That government is despotic where the rulers govern subjects by their own mere will-by degrees and laws emanating from their uncontrolled will, in the enactment and extension of which the ruled have no voice, and under which they have no rights, except at the will of the rulers."”

“Like abolitionists and other radical enemies of slavery, Stevens denounced that institution for what he considered "still graver reasons," reasons reflecting his concern for the enslaved. He despised bondage, he said, because it was a form of "despotism," and he was "opposed to despotism throughout the world."”

“Stevens asserted that "middling classes...are the main support of every free government." ... "those who defend and support the country must have a stake in the soil; must have an interest to protect and rights to defend." A viable republic must rest upon a foundation composed of independent small farmers, "an intelligent and industrious yeomanry" that was "equally removed from luxury and from poverty." ”

“But the sad fact was, Stevens grieved, that "in this glorious country... we can say anything within these walls or beyond them with impunity, unless it be to agitate in favor of human liberty." Only such a defense of human liberty, he added, was considered "aggression" in the U.S. Congress.”

“Thaddeus Stevens disagreed with that stance. He did not believe that creating or joining an anti-slavery third party represented the way forward.... He held to that belief despite knowing "how often we have been cheated by the men of other parties"”

“Liberty Party members opposed voting for candidates who did not seek slavery's abolition. With abolitionist Gerrit Smith, they urged "the necessity of abolitionists to break off from" the Democratic and Whig parties entirely. Those national parties inevitably defended slavery, if only to retain their southern units—"for the South will enter none but pro-slavery parties."”

“By then [1838], Thaddeus Stevens seemed in most ways to have become as firm and outspoken an opponent of slavery as any abolitionist leader. But, like some other antislavery politicians such as William Seward, he was not yet ready to sign on with a political party defined first and foremost by its stand on that issue.”

“For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.”

“what matters now is not a question of profitability,...increased productivity, ... production rates. ... It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it. The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him”