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Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.

Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one.

I speak on due consideration because Britain, France, and Mexico, have abolished slavery, and all other European states are preparing to abolish it as speedily as they can.

Nor was it only from the millions of slaves that chains had been removed; the whole nation had been in bondage; free speech had been suppressed.

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

But you answer, that the Constitution recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply, that this constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations.

As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.