Where none work but slaves, usefulness becomes degradation.
Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1836) p.30 (Unitarian, author, reformer)
A hundred thousand new-born babes are annually added to the victims of slavery; twenty thousand lives are annually sacrificed on the plantations of the South. Such a sight should send a thrill of horror through the nerves of civilization and impel the heart of humanity to lofty deeds. So it might, if men had no found a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold. Instead of listening to the cry of agony, they listen to the ring of dollars and stoop down to pick up the coin
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Could We Trace the Record of Every Human Heart” New York Anti-Slavery Society (1857) (Unitarian, journalist, abolitionist, suffragist, reformer, club-woman)
And the bondman find that the chains are broke,
That no slave breathes our air,
And that in the anthems of the free
The black man’s voice hath share, —
Not the low, deep bass of a gathering storm,
Or the heart-wrung minor tone,
But the glad, free notes of a happy soul,
To whom Freedom’s joys are known.
Phebe Hanaford, “The Live-Oak Tree,” From Shore to Shore (1871) p.97 (Universalist, minister, editor, suffragist)
My cause is the cause of my country and of human liberty…the fulfillment of prophesies that the day shall come when slavery and war shall be banished from the face of the earth.
John Quincy Adams, quoted by Harlow Giles Unger, John Quincy Adams (Unitarian, U.S. President 1825-29, statesman, congressperson, senator)
The money getter, who virtually says let me make money, though I coin it from blood and extract it from tears…in a word all who barter principle for expediency, the true and the right for the available and convenient, are worshipers at the shrine of success.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Unitarian, educator, reformer, abolitionist, suffragist) “Our Greatest Want” Anglo-African Magazine June 1859, quoted by Shirley Wilson Logan, ‘We Are Coming’ The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (1999) p. 55
Freedom is worth nothing in a country that condones slavery.
Theodore Parker (Unitarian, Transcendentalist, abolitionist, reformer, minister)
It is an abuse of language, it is a solemn mockery, it is sheer nonsense, to call that a Republic in which every sixth man is doomed to slavery
George Bradburn (Unitarian, antislavery politician, journalist, minister)
