Quotes About Abolitionists

“Bear in mind, now, that most of this work was done by men who had no intention whatever, when they enlisted, of making war to end slavery. Slavery was killed by the act of war itself. It was the one human institution on all the earth which could not possibly be defended by force of arms, because that force, once called into play, was bound to destroy it. The Union armies which ended slavery were led by men like Grant and Sherman, who had profound sympathies with the South and who had never in their lives shown the slightest sympathies with the abolitionists. But they were also men who believed in the one great, fearful fact about modern war
that when you get into it, the guiding rule is that you have to win it.”

— Bruce Catton

“As a rule, white abolitionists either defended the industrial capitalists or expressed no conscious class loyalty at all. This unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist economic system was evident in the program of the women's rights movement as well. If most abolitionists viewed slavery as a nasty blemish which needed to be eliminated, most women's righters viewed male supremacy in a similar manner-as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society. The leaders of the women's rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related. Within”

— Angela Y. Davis

“Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.”

— Sheila Jeffreys

“It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.
Yes we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.
Yes we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.
Yes we can.
It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can”

— Barack Obama

“As the Bible inculcates upon man but one duty in respect to sin, and that is immediate repentance, abolitionists believe that all who hold slaves, or who approve the practice in others, should immediately cease to do so.”

— Elijah Parish Lovejoy

“Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth.”

— Elijah Parish Lovejoy

“There were thousands of abolitionists who were free traders.”

— Robert Toombs

“There is a large body of abolitionists in Clinton and Clark Counties in this state, and in Wayne County Indiana, that would undoubtedly support such a store, but whether their support would be sufficient, I am unable to say.”

— Gamaliel Bailey

“That a majority of the Abolitionists in this place would patronize a free labor store, in preference to others, I do not doubt; but we do not muster money in Cincinnati.”

— Gamaliel Bailey

“As the war went on, opposition grew. The American Peace Society printed a newspaper, the Advocate of Peace, which published poems, speeches, petitions, sermons against the war, and eyewitness accounts of the degradation of army life and the horrors of battle. The abolitionists, speaking through William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, denounced the war as one "of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapine-marked by ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity ... " Considering the strenuous efforts of the nation's leaders to build patriotic support, the amount of open dissent and criticism was remarkable. Antiwar meetings took place in spite of attacks by patriotic mobs.”

— Howard Zinn

“One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.”

— Carter G. Woodson

“What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays' Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people ... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie ... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us.”

— Jim Hightower

“We should all be neo-abolitionists here to make sure that there is no right in America to enslave others using the Internet.”

— Mark Kirk

“Is art influential? It can be - 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' rallied abolitionists, and 'The Jungle' provoked the demand for a safer food industry.”

— Will Shetterly

“When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men were created equal, he owned slaves. Women couldn't vote. But, throughout history, our abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights leaders called on our nation, in reality, to live up to the nation's professed ideals in that Declaration.”

— Marvin Ammori

“Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew what to do with its sour fruit.”

— Jane Smiley

“Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists.”

— Paul Hawken

“Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties.”

— Pete Seeger

“All the heroes of black emancipation-from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln-were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.”

— Dinesh D'Souza

“Older forms of indentured servanthood and the bond-service of biblical times had often been harsh, but Christian abolitionists concluded that race-based, life-long chattel slavery, established through kidnapping, could not be squared with biblical teaching either in the Old Testament or the New.”

— Timothy Keller

“Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society, but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.”

— Dennis Prager

“Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.”

— Frederick Douglass

“Who freed the slaves? To the extent that they were ever u2018freed,' they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was authored and pressured into existence not by Lincoln but by the great emancipators nobody knows, the abolitionists and congressional leaders who created the climate and generated the pressure that goaded, prodded, drove, forced Lincoln into glory by associating him with a policy that he adamantly opposed for at least fifty-four of his fifty-six years of his life.”

— Lerone Bennett, Jr.

“Abolitionists were men of sharp angles. Organizing them was like binding crooked sticks in a bundle.”

— Jane Swisshelm

“I was in favour of the death penalty, and disposed to regard abolitionists as people whose hearts were bigger than their heads. Four years of close study of the subject gradually dispelled that feeling. In the end I became convinced that the abolitionists were right in their conclusions ... and that far from the sentimental approach leading into their camp and the rational one into that of the supporters, it was the other way about.”

— Ernest Gowers

“Slave rebellions, especially the [1791] Haitian Revolution, had an ongoing effect on the ways in which abolitionists talked about ending slavery.”

— Manisha Sinha

“You point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated. And that, even if we abolish war, we shall not abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath? And do we waste ours now in protesting against war?”

— Rose Macaulay

“The seeds of freedom ... have now been scattered where despotism and tyranny ranked and ruled, will be watered by the enlivening dews of God's clemency, till the reapers abolitionists shall shout the harvest home.”

— Henry McNeal Turner

“Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who ... even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.”

— Susan Jacoby

“Movements are not radical. Movements are the American way. A small group of abolitionists writing and speaking eventually led to the end of slavery. A few stirred-up women brought about women's voting. The Populist movement, the Progressive movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's movement - the examples go on and on of 'little people' getting together and telling the truth about their lives. They made our government act.”

— Unita Blackwell

“We've actually bought quite a number of historical pieces. We are doing a piece on the abolitionists, Harper's Ferry and the abolitionist John Brown with Paul Giamatti.”

— John Landgraf

“There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.”

— Christine Jennings

“I hear you have abolitionists here. We have a few in Illinois, but we shot one the other day.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“Many abolitionists have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“In one point of view, we, the abolitionists and colored people, should meet [the Dred Scott] decision, unlooked for and monstrous as it appears, in a cheerful spirit. This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the downfall and complete overthrow of the whole slave system.”

— Frederick Douglass

“Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that a private faith that did not act in the face of oppression was no faith at all.”

— Charles Colson

“Mark Twain married the daughter of one of New York State's leading Abolitionists, Jervis Langdon, who helped Frederick Douglass who became the great Negro leader to escape from slavery.”

— Hal Holbrook