This was the great cultural encounter initiated by Christopher Columbus. This is the event celebrated each year on Columbus Day. The United States honors only two men with federal holidays bearing their names. In January we commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King junior who struggled to lift the blinders of racial prejudice and to cut the remaining bonds of slavery in America. In October, we honor Christopher Columbus, who opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history. Daniel M Paul, White Supremacists’ Mentality: Columbus Day
As much as I value an union of all the states, I would not admit the southern states into the union, unless they agree to the discontinuance of this disgraceful trade, because it would bring weakness and not strength to the union. George Mason
My respect is worn out. And I have no sympathy for slave-holders. Spotswood Rice
The US is gaining ground. Spreading out across North America. The economy is booming. In the south there’s cotton. In the north industry. But the new nation is divided. In a land where all men are created equal, four million black Americans live as slaves. And it’s tearing the nation apart. America: The Story of the US: Division, History 2010
Cotton: but its rapid spread will plant the seeds of war. Tropical cotton flourishes in American southern states. Its valuable soft fibres are easy to grow. But processing cotton is labour intensive. By hand separating seeds from fibre in a couple of kilos of raw cotton could take a whole day. A simple patent filed on the 4th March 1794 changes that: the cotton gin. By automating the process it deeply divides the country. ibid.
By 1830 America is producing half the world’s cotton; by 1850 it’s nearly three-quarters. Cold white gold, cotton supports a new lavish lifestyle in the south. ibid.
With the cotton explosion, slavery becomes critical to the economy of the south. Slaves are now up to five times more valuable than before the invention of the cotton gin. ibid.
But over-production is destroying the land. So cotton heads west in search of fertile soil, bringing slavery with it. ibid.
The boom is powered on a new machine: the power loom. Raw cotton comes in; finished cloth goes out. All under one roof. The modern factory is born ... 85% are single women between fifteen and twenty-five. Harriet Robinson is ten. ibid.
The mills also revolutionised how Americans dressed. ibid.
Rape is common. America: The Story of the US: Division
Black Americans must carry documents proving they are free or who they belong to. ibid.
Many escaped slaves use a network of secret routes called the Underground Railway. Harriet Tubman is its most famous operator. ibid.
Slavery is the burning issue of the day. ibid.
Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave. Frederick Douglass
The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Frederick Douglass
Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work. Frederick Douglass
I have observed this in my experience of slavery – that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man. Frederick Douglass
From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. Frederick Douglass
Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Frederick Douglass
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. Frederick Douglass
The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. Frederick Douglass
A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnanimity. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning. Frederick Douglass
In thinking of America I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky, her grand old woods, her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers, her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong, when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters. I am filled with unbottled loathing. Frederick Douglass
What upon Earth is the matter with the American people? Do they really covet the world’s ridicule as well as their own social and political ruin? The national edifice is on fire. Every man who can carry a bucket of water or remove a brick is wanted. Yet government leaders persistently refuse to receive as soldiers the slaves, the very class of men which has a deeper interest in the defeat and humiliation of the rebels than all others. Such is the pride, the stupid prejudice and folly that rules the hour. Frederick Douglass
Any attempt now to separate the freedom of the slave from the victory of the government, any attempt to secure peace to the whites while leaving the blacks in chains, will be labor lost. The American people in the government in Washington may refuse to recognise it for a time but the execrable logic of events will force it upon them in that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery. Frederick Douglass
We talk of the irrepressible conflict and practically give the lie to our talk. We wage war against slave-holding rebels yet protect and augment the motive which has moved the slave holders to rebellion. We strike at the effect and leave the cause unharmed. Fire will not burn it out of us. Water cannot wash it out of us. That this war with the slaveholders can never be brought to a desirable termination until slavery – the guilt cause of all our national troubles – has been totally and for ever abolished. Frederick Douglass
We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree. Free forever. Frederick Douglass
The arm of the slaves is the best defence against the arm of the slaveholder. Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. I urge you to fly to arms and smite with death the power that would bury the government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave. This is our golden opportunity. Frederick Douglass, March 5th 1863
This war – disguise it they may – is virtually nothing more nor less than perpetual slavery against universal freedom. And to this end free states will have to come. Frederick Douglass
The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous. Frederick Douglass