"Man to be possessed by man! Man to be made property of! The image of the Deity to be put under the yoke! Let these usurpers show us their title-deeds!"—(Simon Boliver.)
"When I am indulging in my views of American prospects and American liberty, it is mortifying to be told that in that very country a large portion of the people are slaves! It is a dark spot on the face of the nation. Such a state of things cannot always exist."—(Lafayette.)
"I deem it right to raise my humble voice to convince the citizens of America that the slaveholding states are held in abomination by all those whose opinion ought to be valuable. Man is the property of man in about one half of the American States: let them not therefore dare to prate of their institutions or of their national freedom, while they hold their fellow-men in bondage! Of all men living, the American citizen who is the owner of slaves is the most despicable. He is a political hypocrite of the very worst description. The friends of humanity and liberty in Europe should join in one universal cry of shame on the American slave- holders! 'Base wretches!' should we shout in chorus; 'base wretches! how dare you profane the temple of national freedom, the sacred fane of republican rites, with the presence and the sufferings of human beings in chains and slavery!'"—(Daniel O'Connell.)
4. Because it subjects one portion of our American brethren to the unrestrained violence and unholy passions of another.
Here, gentlemen, I might summon to my support a cloud of witnesses, a host of incontrovertible, damning facts, the legitimate results of a system whose tendency is to harden and deprave the heart. But I will not descend to particulars. I am willing to believe that the majority of the masters of your section of the country are disposed to treat their unfortunate slaves with kindness. But where the dreadful privilege of slave-holding is extended to all, in every neighborhood, there must be individuals whose cupidity is unrestrained by any principle of humanity, whose lusts are fiercely indulged, whose fearful power over the bodies, nay, may I not say the souls, of their victims is daily and hourly abused.
Will the evidence of your own Jefferson, on this point, be admissible?
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise, of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot fail to be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his morals and manners undepraved by such circumstances."—(Notes on Virginia, p. 241.)
"Il n'existe a la verite aucune loi qui protege l'esclave le mauvais traitement du maitre," says Achille Murat, himself a Floridian slave- holder, in his late work on the United States.
Gentlemen, is not this true? Does there exist even in Virginia any law limiting the punishment of a slave? Are there any bounds prescribed, beyond which the brutal, the revengeful, the intoxicated slave-master, acting in the double capacity of judge and executioner, cannot pass?
You will, perhaps, tell me that the general law against murder applies alike to master and slave. True; but will you point out instances of masters suffering the penalty of that law for the murder of their slaves? If you examine your judicial reports you will find the wilful murder of a slave decided to be only a trespass!—(Virginia Reports, vol. v. p. 481, Harris versus Nichols.)