To reduce this claim of slavery to an absurdity, it is only necessary to add that there are only two states in which slaves are a majority, and not one in which the slaveholders are not a very disproportionate minority.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It, sometimes, suits the slaveholders to claim, that their slavery is an exclusively State concern; and that the North has, therefore, nothing to do with it.
Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.
Yet thousands of slaves throughout the southern states are thus handed over by the masters who own them to masters who do not; and it does not require much demonstration to prove that their estate is not always the more gracious.
Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.
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.
If the states had to vote on slavery, we would have lost the vote.
Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is dishonor in being slave-owners.
I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the servitude in the patriarchal families.
It is the maintenance of slavery by law in a state, not parallels of latitude, that makes its a southern state; and the absence of this, that makes it a northern state.
If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.