About slavery
“The end (of slavery) is the profit of the master, his security, and the public safety. The subject is one doomed in his own person and his posterity to live without knowledge and without the capacity to make any thing his own, and to toil that another may reap the fruits. Such services can only be expected from one who has no will of his own; who surrenders his will in implicit obedience to that of another. Such obedience is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect. The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect. In the actual condition of things it must be so. There is no remedy. This discipline belongs to the state of slavery.”
Supreme Court of North Carolina, 1829, quoted by Philadelphia Judge George Stroud in his legal treatise, A sketch of the laws relating to slavery in the several states of the United States of America at 10 (H. Longstreth, 1856), available from the Library of Congress at www.hathitrust.org/digital_library. Emphasis added.
“Tom, a slave convicted of murdering Adrian Beekman and Henry Brasier, was sentenced to be ‘burned with a slow fire that he may continue in torment for eight or ten hours.”
Dr. Edgar McManus, Black Bondage in the North at 129-30 (Syracuse Univ. Press 1973). Footnotes omitted.
“Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living themselves and for those for whom they worked. They were not so unhappy as some Northerners thought they were.”
Virginia Seventh Grade Textbook quoted in Dean, “’Who Controls the Past Controls the Future:” The Virginia History Textbook Controversy at 332 (Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol 17, no. 4, 2009).
“Charles [Deslandes, a rebel leader] had his Hands chopped off then shot in one thigh & then the other, until they were both broken-then shot in the Body and before he had expired was put into a bundle of straw and roasted!
“The blacks sent to New Orleans, were convicted and executed. Their heads were placed on high poles, above and below the city, and along the river as far as the plantation on which the revolt began, and on those on which they had committed devastation.”
1811 German Coast Slave Uprising at genealogytrails.com/main/events/slavery_ 7 811 uprising.html, accessed Sept. 25, 2020.
“Enraged whites took [Nat Turner’s] body, skinned it, distributed parts as souvenirs and rendered his remains into grease.”
Dr. Henry Gates, Did African-Americans Slaves rebel? at www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/, accessed Sept. 25 2020.
“[Sojourner Truth] had often heard her father repeat a thrilling story of a little slave-child, which, because it annoyed the family with its cries, was caught up by a white man, who dashed its brains out against the wall. An Indian (for Indians were plenty in that region then) passed along as the bereaved mother washed the bloody corpse of her murdered child, and learning the cause of its death, said, with characteristic vehemence, ‘If I had been here, I would have put my tomahawk in his head!’ meaning the murderer’s.”
Dictated by S. Truth, written and edited by 0. Gilbert, Sojourner Truth’s Narrative and Book of Life at 82-83 (187 5), available from the Library of Congress at http://www.hathitrust.org/digital_library