Quote

What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?

There was free trade in Africa. There was free enterprise in Africa before the colonialists came.

You cannot afford a world with slavery, which literally takes someone and turns them into a machine.

Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years.

Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.

Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese - everything you learned in sixth grade social studies about the great American melting pot.

You got to remember that slavery's very complex. It has a lot of levels to it.

Certainly, Africa accounts for only l % of world trade, and we cannot assure our development on our own.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.