"Abolitionist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... less alarmed. He estimated the Abolitionist vote at twenty thousand, "and before the grand contest of 1840," he wrote Weed, "they will control one-fourth the votes of the State. They are engaged in it with the same honest purpose that governed the great mass of Anti-Masons."[296] The young candidate at Auburn was also in despair. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... embittered not only by the anger of antagonism, but by the feeling of class. A radical of Paine's school was considered by good society as a pestilent blackguard, unworthy of a gentleman's notice,—much as an Abolitionist is looked down upon nowadays by the American "Chivalry." But the strife was confined to meetings, resolutions, and pamphlets. Few riots took place; none of much importance. The gentlemen of England have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... He will not regard that apparent enemy what at heart and soul he really is, namely, a man as pure and devout, as well meaning and conscientious as himself. The man whom he scoffs at as a 'radical,' an 'abolitionist,' and a 'fanatic,' by education and intuition believes in his very soul that the holding of men in bondage, forcing from them involuntary labor, and the consequences thereof, are pregnant with moral and political ruin and decay. The system, not the men, is offensive to his eyes. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... history of the Presbyterians answers a question that may be properly asked of the creed-abolitionist; namely, What bond is left to hold a religious community together? The bond, in their case, simply was voluntary adhesion and custom. A religious community may hold together, like a political party, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... who was largely responsible for the Married Women's Property Bill, presented a review of present suffrage laws; his sister, Mrs. Priscilla Bright McLaren, wife of Duncan McLaren, M. P., and the great Abolitionist, Mrs. Elizabeth Pease Nichol of Edinburgh, sent long and valuable letters. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... curtly: "Very well, cut out the sob stuff. It's up to you to prove that there hasn't been a leak somewhere or a double cross. Send in those rummies,—I want to give them the once over again. There's a nigger in the woodpile somewhere, and I'm no abolitionist! Quick now. Get a ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... and try to be realistic—even if it hurts. There are only two slaves that need freeing here, you and I. These people seem nicely adjusted to the status quo and I see no reason to change it. I'm not starting any abolitionist campaigns until I can see my way clearly out of this mess, and I probably won't start any then either. This planet has been going on a long time without me, and will probably keep rolling along ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in his "Lecture on the Times." It would have taken a long while to get rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings in this lecture had been accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... he in a commanding tone. "The loss of one of these fellers is a serious drawback to my pocket; and that British consul's using the infernalest means to destroy our business, that ever was. He's worse than the vilest abolitionist, because he thinks he's protected by that flag of their'n. If he don't take care, we'll tar-and-feather him; and if his government says much about it, she'll larn what and who South Carolina is. We can turn out a dozen Palmetto regiments that'd lick any thing John Bull could send here, and a ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... political tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I met him at Venice he was in the glow of a generous pride in our war as a war against slavery. He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted, single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms that an original abolitionist might have used, at a time when original abolitionists were not so many ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... have left upon your heart a scar which will not vanish, do not ask me, who came afterward, to wear the scar also. I should then resemble certain of the younger ones here, with less excuse than is theirs. As for the negro, forgive me if I assure you that you retain an Abolitionist exaltation for a creature who does not exist, or whose existence is an ineffectual drop in the bucket, a creature on grateful knees raising faithful eyes to one who has struck off his chains of slavery, whereas the ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... concluded that proofs of his assumptions and assertions might at certain points be thought desirable, if not necessary, and that he should so prolong his work as to provide them. His first idea at this point, as his years went back beyond the beginning of the Abolitionist movement in this country, and as he had been from early boyhood identified with this movement, was to contribute such information as his recollection of events would supply. In other words, he decided to write a narrative, the matter of which would be reminiscent, with here and there ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... abolitionist; settled in Kansas, and resolutely opposed the project of making it a slave state; in the interest of emancipation, with six others, seized on the State armoury at Harper's Ferry in hope of a rising, entrenched himself ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... I thought, and none ever came. On the other hand, it was a vast experiment of indirect philanthropy, and one on which the result of the war and the destiny of the negro race might rest; and this was enough to tax all one's powers. I had been an abolitionist too long, and had known and loved John Brown too well, not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Abolitionist, not even what would be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly, and it became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... days a negro woman was publicly burned to death in Boston. The first Abolition paper was published in Tennessee by Embree. Benjamin Lundy, his successor, could not find a single Abolitionist in Boston. In 1828 over half the people of Tennessee favoured Abolition. At this time there were one hundred and forty Abolition Societies in America—one hundred and three in the South, and not one in Massachusetts. It was not until 1836 that Massachusetts led ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... enough, I hope, when he is a little described. The Ellisons were a West Virginia family who had wandered up into a corner of Northwestern New York, because Dr. Ellison (unceremoniously known to Kitty as Uncle Jack) was too much an abolitionist to live in a slaveholding State with safety to himself or comfort to his neighbors. Here his family of three boys and two girls had grown up, and hither in time had come Kitty, the only child of his youngest brother, who had gone first to Illinois and thence, ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... discussion it became more vital. Indeed, in the first debate, which was opened and closed by Douglas, the relation of the two speakers became dramatic. It was here that Douglas hoping to fasten on Lincoln the stigma of "abolitionist," charged him with having undertaken to abolitionize the old Whig party, and having been in 1854 a subscriber to a radical platform proclaimed at Springfield. This platform Douglas read. Lincoln, when he replied, could only say he was never at the convention—knew nothing ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... and tranquillity, Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau had watched the stream of American girlhood flow through "the Center" and surge around the palms for twenty-eight years. The statue was originally made at the request of Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman, the well-known abolitionist and dear friend of Miss Martineau; but after Mrs. Chapman's death, it was Miss Whitney's to dispose of, and, representing as it did her ideal modern woman, she gave it in 1886 to Wellesley, where modern womanhood was in the making. In later years, irreverent ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... applied to a human being, is not current in good literature, unless low comedy be entitled to that position, and coming from Hawthorne, of all writers, it seems like an oath from the mouth of a woman. Tupper, who was quite proud of his philanthropy, was also much of an abolitionist, and he may have trodden on Hawthorne's metaphysical toes half a dozen times, without being aware of what he was doing. Altogether, it seems like rather an ill return for Tupper's hospitality; but Hawthorne himself did not ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... continued, wiping her eyes demurely, "that if a young woman about my size, who had got perfectly tired and sick of all this fuss made about yo', because yo' were a No'th'n man, managing niggers—if that young woman wanted to show her people what sort of a radical and abolitionist a SO'TH'N man of their own sort might become, she'd have sent for Jack Dumont as a sample? Eh? Only, I declare to goodness, I never reckoned that he and Higbee would revive the tomfooling of the vendetta, and take to shootin' ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... told that he might be sent to jail for his defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law, he quietly answered, "I can go to jail." The thing he could not do was to deny the man's appeal to him for help. Before the war he was known as an Abolitionist—after it, as a Conservative, his sympathy with and for the South being very strong. During the draft riots in 1863 the spirit of lawlessness was on the point of breaking out in the river towns. I happened to be home from Virginia, and learned that my ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... suggestion of negro blood. Could it be proved, I was free; that taint I could not pardon. [And here, even as the surgeon spoke, I noticed this as the peculiarity of the New England Abolitionist. Theoretically he believed in the equality of the enslaved race, and stood ready to maintain the belief with his life, but practically he held himself entirely aloof from them; the Southern creed and practice were the exact reverse.] I made ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... speak, although evasion or silence would have been the more comfortable alternative. "I doubt," says Mr. Chadwick,[129] "if Garrison or Parker had a keener sense than his of the enormity of human slavery. Before the first Abolitionist Society had been organized, he was one of the organizers of a committee for the discussion and advancement of emancipation. I have read all of his principal writings upon slavery, and it would be hard to find more terrible indictments of its wickedness. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... was passed in 1850 for the stricter regulation of the return of escaped slaves to their owners. In his answer to this question Lincoln showed clearly that he was not an Abolitionist, as ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... noisy,—glad into their very cellars and shanties; the sun was sorry to go away. No wonder. His heartiest ruby-gleam lingered about the white Virginia heights behind the town, and across the river quite glorified the pale stretch of the Ohio hills. Free and slave. (Adam was an Abolitionist.) Well, let that be. God's hand of power, like His sunlight, held the master and the slave in loving company. To-morrow was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... I should urge the solution which is positive, or, as silly people say, "optimistic." I should set my face, that is, against most of the solutions that are solely negative and abolitionist. Most educators of the poor seem to think that they have to teach the poor man not to drink. I should be quite content if they teach him to drink; for it is mere ignorance about how to drink and when to drink that is accountable for most of his tragedies. I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... year 1800, the Covenanter church of this country said in her synod: "Slavery and Christianity are incompatible," and never relaxed her discipline which forbade fellowship with slave-holders—so I was brought up an abolitionist. I was still a child when I went through Wilkins' township collecting names to a petition for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Here, in a strictly orthodox Presbyterian community, I was everywhere ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... result fifteen vessels sailed with eleven hundred and ninety Negroes in 1792. Arriving in Africa, they found the chief white man in control there so drunk that he soon died of delirium tremens. John Clarkson, however, brother of Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, eventually took the lead, founded Freetown, and the colony began its checkered career. In 1896 the colony was saved from insurrection by the exiled Maroon Negroes from Jamaica. After 1833, when emancipation in English colonies took place, severer measures against the slave trade ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... it led Dr. John G. Palfry, who had inherited a plantation in Louisiana, to emancipate his slaves; and, as he has more than once said, it changed the course of Col. T. W. Higginson's life and made him an abolitionist. "As it was the first anti-slavery work ever printed in America in book form, so," says Col. Higginson, "I have always thought it the ablest." Whittier says, "It is no exaggeration to say that no man or woman at that period rendered more substantial service to the cause of freedom, or made such ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... think that for that very reason John Courteney let his wife—from Philadelphia, you know—abolitionist—bring the girl and Dan together, hoping he'd either set her free or else skip the wedding and somehow disgrace the whole Hayle family. Just those boys' guess but—they believe it. What they see is a Hayle killed and no one killed ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... for their timely aid, we had surely been recaptured. The negroes, too, were powerful helps, and in no single case has a black man proved treacherous to his suffering white brother, I was not an Abolitionist when the war broke out, but I am one now, and to see the negro free I would almost spill my last drop of blood. They are a patient, all-enduring, faithful race, and without them the bones of many a poor wretch who now sits by his own fireside and recounts the perils he has escaped, would whiten ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... some of his patients on the island, and before his departure a most animated discussion took place upon the subject of the President of the United States, his talents, qualifications, opinions, above all, his views with regard to the slave system. Mr. ——, who you know is no abolitionist, and is a very devoted Van Buren man, maintained with great warmth the President's straight-forwardness, and his evident and expressed intention of protecting the rights of the South. The doctor, on the other hand, quoted a certain speech of the President's, upon the question of abolishing ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... duties of an agent of the "Freedmen's Bureau." The thorough subserviency of Northern sentiment to the domination of that masterly will which characterized "the South" of the old regime was never better illustrated. "Curse me this people!" said the Southern Balak—of the Abolitionist first, of the Bureau-Officer next, and then of the Carpet-Bagger. The Northern Balaam hemmed and paltered, and then—cursed the ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... eloquence of the North. The convention met for a purpose and it spoke boldly. It accepted the issue as presented by the men of the South, and it offered no compromise. In its ranks were all shades of anti-slavery opinion,—the patient Abolitionist, the Free-Soiler of the Buffalo platform, the Democrats who had supported the Wilmot Proviso, the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... story of the negro malefactor hung in a cage from a tree, and pecked at by crows, it is certain that the traveller justly regarded slavery as the one conspicuous blot on the new country's shield. Crevecoeur was not an active abolitionist, like that other naturalised Frenchman, Benezet of Philadelphia; he had his own slaves to work his northern farms; he was, however, a man of humane feelings—one who "had his doubts." [Footnote: In his Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie (sic) et dans l'Etat de New York (Paris, 1801) slavery ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... to go to Georgetown, and at Mr. Fraser's office accidentally heard that Scip—who is well known and universally liked there—was to have a public whipping that evening. Something prompted me to inquire into it, and I was told that he had been charged by B—— with shielding a well-known abolitionist at Conwayboro—a man who was going through the up-country distributing such damnable publications as the New-York Independent and Tribune. I knew, of course, it referred to you, and that it wasn't true. I went to Scip and got the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... great disasters, we may go so far as to believe what a great French writer has declared in a work on Military Art, that 'War is war, and he wages it best who injures his enemy most.' We are aware of the horror which this fanatical radical, and, of course, Abolitionist axiom, by a writer of the school of Napoleon, must inspire, and therefore qualify the assertion by the word 'may.' For to believe that the main props of the enemy are to be knocked away from under them, and that we are to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and Ethics" is found: "There is no explicit condemnation in the teaching of our Lord.... It remains true that the abolitionist could point to no one text in the Gospels in defense of his position, while those who defended slavery could appeal at any rate ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... bluff, kind-hearted man the shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green had a school in Oneida County, New York, with a score of mischievous boys. "I'm going to bring a black boy here to educate," said Beriah Green, as only a crank and an abolitionist would have dared to say. "Oho!" laughed the boys. "Ye-es," said his wife; and Alexander came. Once before, the black boy had sought a school, had travelled, cold and hungry, four hundred miles up into ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in the middle of the drawing-room, and one of the dark-skinned ladies blushingly put hers within it. Many years afterwards, dining at Washington with that agreeable man, Charles Sumner, the great abolitionist, and some very charming ladies, I amused myself by telling him about my Bathurst dinner, and asked him whether HE had ever given his arm to a negress. I awaited his answer with some curiosity, to see whether he would dare answer ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... few readers of radical Abolitionist papers must often have seen the singular name of Sojourner Truth, announced as a frequent speaker at Anti-Slavery meetings, and as travelling on a sort of self-appointed agency through the country. I had myself often remarked the name, but never met the individual. On ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... list of the zealous soldiers of humanity. The candidate held to the ground he had taken at Oxford and in his election address, and apparently made converts. He had an interview with forty voters of abolitionist complexion at his hotel, and according to the friendly narrative of his brother, who was present, 'he shone not only in his powers of conversation, but by the tact, quickness, and talent with which he made his replies, to the thorough and complete satisfaction of baptists, wesleyan methodists, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the kind, unless I'm called up as a witness in court; but you can't prowl about here long without being seen and arrested as a suspicious character, an abolitionist, or some other sort of scoundrel—which last you know you are," Arthur could not help adding in a parenthesis. "So take my advice, and retreat while you can. Now out o' the way, if you please, ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... parliament building, now a bank; Kings and Queens College, that gives diplomas to women; the parks, the cemeteries, the tomb of Daniel O'Connell. She attended a meeting of the common council, of which Alfred Webb, the only surviving son of the old abolitionist, Richard D. Webb, was a member, and there she listened to a discussion on a petition to the queen that the people of Dublin might be allowed to elect their own tax-collector instead of having one placed over them by "the powers ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... speech, Mr. Adams said, that even admitting the object of the petitioners is abolition, as has been alleged, they had the right to petition for that too; for every individual in the country had a right to be an abolitionist. The great men of the Revolution were abolitionists, and if any man denies it, I ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... You sit still." And Irene went off to intercept the Miss Abercrombie her father had married all those years ago instead of Gwen's mother. She does not come much into this story, but its reader may be interested to know that she was an enthusiastic Abolitionist, and a friend of the Duchess of Sutherland. There was only one thing in those days that called for abolition—negro slavery in America; so everyone who recollects the fifties will know what an Abolitionist was. Nevertheless, though Lady Torrens happens to keep outside the story, it would have been ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... make ourselves an armchair of our sins. As for America, I honor America in much; but I would not be an American for the world while she wears that shameful scar upon her brow. The address of the new president[11] exasperates me. Observe, I am an abolitionist, not to the fanatical degree, because I hold that compensation should be given by the North to the South, as in England. The states should unite in buying ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... highly unfashionable, say even deeply vulgar, in the leading circle surrounding Government House. For those who had the infirmity of such puritanical leanings there was an approach to the antipathy, plus contempt, of the southern slaver of the States for his northern abolitionist countryman. When my friend, Mr. (afterwards Sir) S.A. Donaldson introduced me, for my temporary stay, at the Australian Club, then the high quarters of the party, he passed me a friendly hint to steer ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... out something about its being "the life of the dog, Ma'am." She wondered what he meant by that! She looked over at his bearish figure, snuff-drabbled waistcoat, and shock of black hair. Well, poor man, he could not help it, if he were coarse, and an Abolitionist, and a Fourierite, and——She was getting a little muddy now, she was conscious, so turned her mind back to the repose of her stocking. Margret took it very quietly, seeing her father flaming so. But Margret never had any opinions to express. She was not like ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... when that day comes, the most 'rapid abolitionist' will say-'Behold, I saw all this while on the earth?' Will he not rather say, 'Oh, who has conceived the breadth and depth of this moral malaria, this putrescent plague-spot?' Perhaps the pioneers ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... said that William Wilberforce, the abolitionist, was a Christian. But at any rate his Christianity was strongly diluted with unbelief. As an abolitionist he did not believe Leviticus xxv, 44-6; he must have rejected Exodus xxi, 2-6; he could not have accepted the many permissions and injunctions by the Bible ...
— Humanity's Gain from Unbelief - Reprinted from the "North American Review" of March, 1889 • Charles Bradlaugh |
