"Abolitionist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... became the centre of the Abolitionist movement in New York State and for many years before the Civil War it was a busy station on the "Underground railroad," by which fugitive slaves were assisted in escaping to Canada. The fervor of the movement gave prominence to Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... sure that you do not drop her anywhere along the coast of my own state of Kentucky; for if you do, she will untie the sack and swim ashore into my constituency, where I have trouble enough without the Countess St. Auban, active abolitionist, to increase it. Trouble '—said he to me—'thy ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... accord, "Kill the nigger!" "Kill the nigger!" Even those who may have pitied me, if any such were among them, lacked the moral courage to come and volunteer their evidence. The slightest manifestation of sympathy or justice toward a person of color, was denounced as abolitionism; and the name of abolitionist, subjected its bearer to frightful liabilities. "D—n abolitionists," and "Kill the niggers," were the watch-words of the foul-mouthed ruffians of those days. Nothing was done, and probably there would not have been any thing done, had I been killed in the affray. The laws and the ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... I became an abolitionist and conscientiously refused to vote or accept citizenship under a constitution which ordered ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the postmaster to let us all know up here, the instant he gets word," said Sheraton. "If that black abolitionist, Lincoln, wins, they're going to fire one anvil shot in the street, and we can hear it up this valley this far. If the South wins, then two anvils, as fast as they can load. So, Mr. Cowles, if we hear a single shot, it is ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... New England, who, with emotion, had listened to Phillips and to Garrison, had afterward hired his harsh energies to the slave owner. And it was this hard driving that taught the negro vaguely to despise the abolitionist. But as a class the slaves were not unhappy. They were ignorant, but the happiest song is sometimes sung by ignorance. They believed the Bible as read to them by the preachers, and the Bible told them that God had made ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... Father was tired of hearing him. He said Phil was a regular abolitionist," Flora ...
— Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter • Alice Turner Curtis
... an insulting letter from Charleston, informing me that, if I were ever caught in the city, an arrangement had been made to tar and feather me as an Abolitionist. ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... The cry was at once taken up by a thousand voices, and the crowd started down the street. But instead of going to his house, they went to that of his brother, Lewis, in Hose Street, a still more obnoxious Abolitionist. Reaching it, they staved open the doors, and smashed in the windows, and began to pitch the furniture into the street. Chairs, sofas, tables, pictures, mirrors, and bedding, went out one after another. But all at once ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... point of view. The negro will never disturb this country again. The worst that is to be apprehended from him is now: he may revolt and cause more destruction than any Northern man, except it be the ultra-abolitionist, wants to see. A Northern army may be required in the next ninety days to go South to suppress a negro insurrection. As much as the South have vilified the North, that army would go on such a mission and with ...
— Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Father and His Youngest Sister, - 1857-78 • Ulysses S. Grant
... a few words concerning my personal identity. Many have insanely supposed me to be George Thompson, the celebrated English abolitionist and member of the British Parliament, but such cannot be the case, that individual having returned to his own country. Again—others have taken me for George Thompson, the pugilist; but by far the greater part of the performers in this interesting "Comedy of Errors" ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... merchants of 'Cabo Corso' used to send their people hereabouts to dig; and more recently Mr. Carter had spent, they say, 4,000l. upon the works. He was followed by another roving Englishman, who was not more successful. The liberation of pawns and other anti-abolitionist 'fads' had so raised the wage-rate that the rich placers were presently left to the natives. We exchanged reminiscences, and he at once started down stream ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... he said, that Lincoln was not elected as an abolitionist. Lincoln declared, and the Republican party declared, that they stood by the constitution; that they would, so far as the constitution allowed, restrict slavery and prevent its extension to new territory. Yet they knew that the constitution gave them all they desired. "Well did they know, ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... I wouldn't, and I'll stick to it. Honest INJUN, I will. People would call me a low-down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum—but that don't make no difference. I ain't a-going to tell, and I ain't a-going back there, anyways. So, now, le's know all ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... acts, except by a two thirds vote of both houses. This would have tied the hands of the federal government most unfortunately; and the New Englanders, enlightened by their own interests, saw it to be so. Here were the materials ready for a compromise, or, as the stout abolitionist, Gouverneur Morris, truly called it, a "bargain" between New England and the far south. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut consented to the prolonging of the foreign slave-trade for twenty years, or until ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... step I saw my constituents march up to my position, and the district at last completely disenthralled by the ceaseless and faithful administration of anti-slavery truth. The tables were completely turned. Almost everybody was an Abolitionist, and nobody any longer made a business of swearing that he was not. In canvassing my district it became the regular order of business for a caravan of candidates for minor offices, who were sportively called the "side show," to follow me from point to point, all vying with each other ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... cause in the United States. Her kindness to William and Ellen Craft must be well known there; and it is also related in the newspapers, that she bequeathed a legacy to a young American to assist him under any disadvantages he might suffer as an abolitionist. ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the important public questions then coming to a great national crisis. This is an unjust view. It has already become plain, in the course of the story of his life, that he was not a reformer nor in any real sympathy with reform. He was not only not an abolitionist, which in itself, in view of the closeness of his association with the friends of the cause, argues great immobility in his character; he was, on the contrary, a Democrat in national politics, and took the party view ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... Jacob Bright, 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. Mrs. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • 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, with only a vague tacit understanding. When a body is once formed, it ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... English public opinion, in this most vital matter of her time. She was guided not merely by humanitarian disgust at the cruel and brutal abominations of slavery,—though we know no reason why this alone should not be a sufficient ground for turning Abolitionist,—but also on the more purely political ground of the cowardice, silence, corruption, and hypocrisy that were engendered in the Free States by purchased connivance at the peculiar institution of the Slave States. Nobody has yet traced out the full effect upon the national ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... history. The blood that was mingled at Yorktown and at Eutaw cannot be kept at enmity forever. The Whigs of Bunker Hill are the same as the Whigs of Georgia." Mr. Toombs was actually charged in this campaign with being an Abolitionist. He was accused of saying in a speech at Mallorysville, Ga., during the Harrison campaign, that slavery was "a moral and political evil." This was now brought up against him. Mr. Toombs admitted saying that slavery was a political evil. He wrote a ringing letter ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... waiting, and Molly doesn't like to wait, you know. I got dinner at Merry Oaks tavern by the way, and a mighty bad one, too, but the worst thing about it was that they actually had the impudence to put me at the table with an abolitionist. Why, I'd as soon eat with a darkey, sir, and so I told him, ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... slaveholders.' After a time, a careful reconsideration of the subject convinced me that there was no necessity for 'dissolving the union between the northern and southern States;' that to seek this dissolution was no part of my duty as an abolitionist; that to abstain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery; and that the Constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, was in its ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... Lloyd Garrison are never tired of condemning Dr. Channing for what they call his timidity, his shunning any personal contact with the great abolitionist, his failure to grapple boldly with the evils of slavery, and his half-hearted espousal of the cause of abolition. The Unitarians generally are by these writers regarded in ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... courage, and the 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 Whigs who had ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the son of a white trader, or a small cultivator, he knew well enough that his position would be a very serious one, and that he would have had to ride to the border of the State with all speed. He would have been denounced at once as an Abolitionist, and would have been accused of stirring up the slaves to rebellion against their masters; a crime of the most serious kind in the Southern States. But placed as he was, as the heir of a great estate worked by slaves, such a cry could hardly be raised against ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... in saying that I was an anti-slavery man, though not an abolitionist, before the war. These terms have greatly enlarged their relative meaning since the rebellion broke out. I regard universal emancipation as one of the necessary consequences of the rebellion, or rather as one of the means absolutely necessary to a complete restoration of the ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... mob attacked and destroyed there the press of James G. Birney, the editor of the Philanthropist, because of the encouragement his abolitionist organ gave to the immigrating Negroes.[43] But in 1841 came a decidedly systematic effort on the part of foreigners and proslavery sympathizers to kill off and drive out the Negroes who were becoming too well established in that city and who ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... fathers should, the merits of the struggle, I became an intense Northerner. All my father's sympathies were with the North, both on the imperative duty of maintaining the Union and on the slavery issue. He was an intense abolitionist. As a lad of sixteen or seventeen, he had given up sugar, at the end of the 'twenties, because in those days sugar was grown by slaves on the West Indian plantations. He would not support a slave industry, and until the slaves were freed he did ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Those who fought the anti-slavery battle in Massachusetts have little realization of the difficulty and danger of maintaining similar sentiments in a slaveholding community, and a slave State. Mrs. Gage spoke boldly whenever her thought seemed to be required, and soon found herself branded as an "abolitionist" with every adjective appended that could ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... ago, the subject of the following brief Memoir came to me, bearing with him a letter from a dear friend and distinguished abolitionist in the United States, from which the following is an extract:—'I seize my pen in haste to gratify a most worthy colored friend of mine, by giving him a letter of introduction to you, as he intends sailing ...
— Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America • Moses Grandy
... The abolitionist charges the slave-holder with being a man-stealer. He makes this allegation in two affirmations. First, that the slave-holder is thus guilty, because, the negro having been kidnapped in Africa, therefore those who now hold ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... stranger in the place and was from the East. One of the men, a Mr. Edson, was, to use his own words, "mighty skeary of Northern folks," and as soon as he became convinced that the stranger was from that way, he got up, thinking to himself, "Some confounded Abolitionist, I'll warrant. The sooner I go home and get my gang together, the better 'twill be." But on second thought he concluded that "his gang" was safe, for the present at least; so he'd just sit down and hear what his neighbor, Mr. Woodburn, was saying to ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... [The enthusiastic abolitionist, Mrs. Lydia Child, had written to me, requesting me to give her for publication some portions of the journal I had kept during my residence in Georgia; and I had corresponded with my friend Mrs. Charles Sedgwick ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... makes me a nabob in the town-another time I'm from New York, and has monstrous letters of introduction to the squire. Then I goes among the niggers and comes it over their stupid; tells 'em how I'm an abolitionist in a kind of secret way-gets their confidence. And then I larns a right smart deal of sayings from the Bible-a nigger's curious on Christianity, ye see-and it makes him think ye belong to that school, sartin! All the deviltry ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... civil war raged in America, between the slave-holding Southern States (the Confederates) and the abolitionist Northern States (the Federals). At first, British feeling was strongly in favour of the Northerners; but it changed before long, partly in consequence of their seizure of two Confederate envoys on a British mail-steamer, the Trent, and of the interruption of our cotton trade, ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... the two sections had been cordially united, should the advent to power of one political party have been the signal for so much disquietude on the part of the other? Had the presidential seat been suddenly usurped by an abolitionist tyrant of the type of Robespierre the South could hardly have exhibited greater apprehension. Few Americans denied that a permanent Union, such as had been designed by the founders of the Republic, was the best guarantee of prosperity and peace. And yet because a certain number ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... with the unflagging zeal of an olden Puritan fighting for liberty and his soul's salvation. He was a superb horseman—as all the older Illinoisans are and, for all his two-score years and ten, he recognized few superiors for strength and activity in the Battalion. A radical, uncompromising Abolitionist, he had frequently asserted that he would rather die than yield to a Rebel, and he kept his word in this as ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... abolitionist of whatever hue, not one republican whatever, was in any way troubled or thought about the political convictions of General McClellan at the time when he was put at the head of the army. All the abolitionists and republicans, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... anger of the Southerners had somewhat cooled, Friend Hopper invited them to come and see him. They called, and spent the evening in discussing the subject of slavery. When they parted from the veteran abolitionist, it was with mutual courtesy and kindliness. They said they respected him for acting so consistently with his own principles; and if they held the same opinions, they should doubtless pursue ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... relative of the deceased; and as this man bore, or assumed, Mr. Slator's name, the case was brought before one of those horrible tribunals, presided over by a second Judge Jeffreys, and calling itself a court of justice, but before whom no coloured person, nor an abolitionist, was ever known to get ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... what was pleasant against what was painful in spite of evidence: to grant honesty to all men (with the possible exception of the Yankee army and a few local scalawags known as Readjusters); to deny virtue to no woman, not even to the New England Abolitionist; to regard the period before the war in Virginia as attained perfection, and the present as falling short of that perfection only inasmuch as it had occurred since the surrender. As life in a small place, among a simple and ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... his legislative work was what is known as the Lincoln-Stone protest. This looks to-day so harmless that it is not easy to understand the situation in 1837. The pro-slavery feeling was running high, an abolitionist was looked on as a monster and a menace to national law and order. It was in that year that the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered—martyred—at Alton, Ill. The legislature had passed pro-slavery resolutions. There were many in the legislature who did not approve of these, ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... disagreed with him on every point of ethics and economics, I was still responsible for him as a guest. It was as if an English gentleman had introduced a blatant American Democrat into Tory society; or, rather, as if a Southerner of the olden time had harbored a Northern Abolitionist and permitted him to inquire into the workings of slavery among his neighbors. People would tolerate him as my guest for a time, but there must be an end of their patience with the tacit enmity of his sentiments and the explicit vulgarity of his ideals, and when the end ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... a meetin' for foundin' a college for our coloured brethren. Uncle Tom had set some folks half crazy, and others half mad, and what he couldn't do Aunt Harriet did. 'Well,' sais I to myself, 'is this bunkum, or what in natur is it? If I go, I shall be set down as a spooney abolitionist; if I don't go, I shall be set down as an overseer or nigger driver, and not a clockmaker. I can't please nobody any way, and, what is wus, I don't believe I shall please Mr Slick, no how I can fix it. Howsoever, I will go and see which way ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... wickedness of slavery. I heard him to the end, and then said, "There is nothing you have said upon that subject that I do not agree to entirely. You cannot say too much against slavery; but I call myself an abolitionist, and while I live, I mean to say and do all I can against it. There are many people in America, also, who feel as I do, and we ...
— Travellers' Tales • Eliza Lee Follen
... abuses to which it so often gives rise—the tortures, vengeances, murders, and fiendish punishments, which in their turn follow the crime—are portrayed with striking truthfulness and real power. The author is evidently no Abolitionist on hear-say—the whole poem gives evidence of practical familiarity with 'the institution,' and the sense of truth has inspired his pen in many passages with wonderful power. The terrible sufferings of an almost ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... 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 ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... already the change is beginning to show. Go talk to the Advertising people—there's a delicate indicator of social change if there ever was one. See what they say. Who are they backing in the Government? You? Like hell. Rinehart? No, they're backing up 'Moses' Tyndall and his Abolitionist goon-squad who preach that rejuvenation is the work of Satan, and they're giving him enough strength that he's even getting you worried. How about Roderigo Aviado and his Solar Energy Project down in Antarctica? Do you know what ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... make rhymes myself and to imagine stories and adventures." The second event was the appearance in print of some of his verses, which his sister had, unknown to him, sent to a Newburyport paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison. The great abolitionist thought enough of the poetry to ride out to Whittier's home and urge him to get an education. This event made an indelible impression ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... also remember very well a Presbyterian church on Laight Street, opposite St. John's Park, the rector of which was the Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Cox, an uncle of the late Bishop Arthur Cleveland Cox of the Episcopal Church. Dr. Cox was a prominent abolitionist, and when we were living on Hubert Street, just around the corner, this church was stoned by a mob because the rector had expressed ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... our money, our sympathy and our prayers. Let us join in the fight, and by-and-by we will share in the triumph. Dr. Strieby, you can remember just before this society was formed, that it was a disgrace to be an abolitionist. It is a glory now. The day is not far distant, yea, its light is already breaking in the western sky, when it will be considered equally glorious to have helped save our Indian brother, by leading him back again to God. And ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... saw you at home," Lincoln began, "it was agreed that I should write to you and your brother Madison. Until I then saw you I was not aware of your being what is generally called an Abolitionist, or, as you call yourself, a Liberty man, though I well knew there were many ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... to resign it; every enemy to it was looked upon as a disbeliever in Divine Providence, and any nefarious churchwarden who wished to succeed in his election had nothing to do but to represent his antagonist as an abolitionist, in order to frustrate his ambition, endanger his life, and throw the village into a state of the most dreadful commotion. By degrees, however, the obnoxious street grew to be so well peopled, and its inhabitants so firmly united, that their oppressors, more afraid of injustice, ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... The Abolitionist of to-day is the Iconoclast of the age, and his mission is to break the idolatrous images set up by a hypocritical Church, a Sham Democracy, or a corrupt public sentiment, and to substitute in their stead the simple and beautiful doctrine of a common brotherhood. He would elevate ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... performed the 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 ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... thirty-second Congress assembled in Washington on the 1st of December. In both houses there is a strong majority for the Democratic party. Of the Senators, twenty-four are Whigs, two (Hale and Sumner) distinctive Free Soilers, thirty-four Democrats including Mr. Chase of Ohio, an avowed Abolitionist, and Messrs. Rhett and Butler of South Carolina, Secessionists. There are now three vacancies in the Senate, the last occasioned by the resignation of Mr. Clay, on account of ill-health and his great age. This illustrious orator and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... "Here's a go. Who is Miss Dory? Some trollop, of course—and she is dead, and old Miss, too. Who is old Miss? and who is Mandy Ann the Colonel is to buy? I'd laugh, rank Abolitionist as he is! And what will he do with a child? Crackers and ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... all crimes." In which summation he showed himself indeed a "sumner," as it was called of yore. Which cost me many a bitter hour and much sorrow, for there was hardly a soul whom I knew, except my mother, to whom an Abolitionist was not simply the same thing as a disgraceful, discreditable malefactor. Even my father, when angry with me one day, could think of nothing bitterer than to tell me that I knew I was an Abolitionist. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... slavery 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 armed in it, was ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... volumes of such description. His work is a storehouse of fact, useful to this day to the American historical student[18]. George Combe, philosopher and phrenologist, studied especially social institutions[19]. Joseph Sturge, philanthropist and abolitionist, made a tour, under the guidance of the poet Whittier, through the Northern and Eastern States[20]. Featherstonaugh, a scientist and civil engineer, described the Southern slave states, in terms completely at variance with those of Sturge[21]. Kennedy, traveller in Texas, and later British consul ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... the concloosion by the way in which eevents begins to accumyoolate in my immedyit vicin'ty. Bill Wheeler announces without a word of warnin' that he's a flyin' alligator, besides advancin' the theery that Gene Hemphill is about as deeserv'dly pop'lar as a abolitionist in South Caroliny. I suspects that this attitoode of mind on Bill's part is likely to provoke discussion, which suspicion is confirmed when Gene knocks Bill down, an' boots him into the dooryard. Once in the open, after a clout or two, Gene an' Bill ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... but it mates and masters the fear of death. Sinner, as well as saint, may be guillotined or lynched, and endure it well. A red Indian or a Chinese robber will dare the stake as composedly as an early Christian or an abolitionist. One of the bravest of all death-scenes was the execution of Simon, Lord Lovat, who was unquestionably one of the greatest scoundrels that ever burdened the earth. We must look deeper. The test of a man is not in the amount of his endurance, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... insinuated, quietly, that no political law should therefore sustain it, and took exception to the idea that what was domestic was therefore without the province of legislation. When I exampled polygamy, Hill became passionate, and asked if I was an abolitionist. I opined that I was not, and he so far relented as to say that slavery was sanctioned by divine and human laws; that it was ultimately to be embraced by all white nationalities, and that the Caucasian was certain, in the end, to subjugate and ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... 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 as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... She was not like Alston, not like his sister, who had a highbred charm, something in the way of Alston's own. Mother was different. She was of the Griswolds who had land in Cuba and other islands, and were said to have kept slaves there while the Choates were pouring blood into the abolitionist cause. There was a something about mother quite different from anybody in Addington. She conformed beautifully, but you would have felt she understood your not conforming. She never came to grief over the neutralities of the place, and you realised it was because she expressed so few opinions. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... in a huge amphitheater, singing temperance songs—a beautiful sight. Then in another part of the palace was an audience of 2,000 listening to speeches. Among the speakers was Canon Wilberforce, a grandson of the great Abolitionist but a degenerate one. He said the reason the temperance movement was now progressing so rapidly was because the persons who led it were praying people, and that the Lord had willed it, and all depended on whether it was kept in the Lord's hands—if not, then it ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... understanding on the part of their employer, and with an intention on their part, to misrepresent the South, and to excite prejudice in Northern minds. How devoid of patriotism, truth and justice. The mischief done by these misrepresentations is inconceivable. If every abolitionist North of Mason and Dixon's line, were separately and individually asked, from whence he derived his opinions and prejudices in relation to Southern men, and Southern slavery, nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand would answer, that they had learned all that they ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... minister's son, and descended from a very old and distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood in Cambridge in 1819. After a somewhat turbulent course, he was graduated from Harvard in 1838, the year of Emerson's "Divinity School Address." He studied law, turned Abolitionist, wrote poetry, married the beautiful and transcendental Maria White, and did magazine work in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was thought by his friends in the eighteen-fifties to be "the most Shakespearian" man in America. When he was ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... crusade, and he published a book upon slavery in 1835; 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 ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... vain, Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter; With heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair. Wearing the coat of indifference to hide the shame of defeat; I, child of the abolitionist idealism— A sort of Brand in a birth of half-and-half. What other thing could happen when I defended The patriot scamps who burned the court house That Spoon River might have a new one Than plead them ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... The one Abolitionist who sustained Mr. Garrison's position, and sat with him in the gallery, was Nathaniel P. Rogers, editor of the Herald of Freedom, in Concord, New Hampshire, who died in the midst of the Anti-Slavery struggle. However, the debates in the Convention had the effect of rousing English minds to thought ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... One would think you a northern abolitionist. I understand whence you imbibed such principles"—sneeringly—"just as though one has not a perfect right to sell a slave if he wishes to! Don't talk to me in any such way. I have done nothing that I need be sorry for. But Kizzie is indeed the ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... their masters. Public opinion has made the laws, and denied the slaves legislative protection. Public opinion has knotted the lash, heated the branding-iron, loaded the rifle, and shielded the murderer. Public opinion threatens the abolitionist with death, if he venture to the South; and drags him with a rope about his middle, in broad unblushing noon, through the first city in the East. Public opinion has, within a few years, burned a slave alive at a slow fire in ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... for the storm that raged within him. He had not been brought up an Abolitionist—far from it. Nor had his father's friends—who were deemed at that time the best people in Boston—been Abolitionists. Only three years before, when Boston had been aflame over the delivery of the fugitive Anthony Burns, Stephen had gone out of curiosity to the meeting ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a sort of suppressed fury, "one would think you had turned Abolitionist; only you never heard of such ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... anti-slavery?' And my horror sits pale, and cold, and hard while he gives me to understand that he has as much respect for me as he might have for a Negro, and that it has nothing to do with his feelings, but with his opinions as an abolitionist." ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... his Harper's Ferry raid, and people in Concord still dwell upon the exciting incident of Mr. Sanborn's arrest in 1860 as an accessory before the fact. The United States deputy marshal with his myrmidons drove out from Boston in a hack. They lured the unsuspecting abolitionist outside his door, on some pretext or other, clapped the handcuffs on him, and tried to get him into the hack. But their victim, planting his long legs one on each side of the carriage door, resisted sturdily, and his neighbors ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... to say, that on this occasion I was well received, and at the close of my first lecture was invited to spend the evening at the house of the Rev. Lyndon King. This gentleman having long been known as a devoted abolitionist,—a fervid preacher of the doctrine, that character is above color,—and as one of the ablest advocates of the social, political, and religious rights of the colored man, I, of course, had a pleasant visit with the family; and, remaining with them several days, conceived a ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... again in a twinkling, "won't have 'em! Bad enough to see whites ducking and grinning round for a favor, without having those poor devils of niggers congeeing round for their corn. Though, to me, the niggers are the freer of the two. You are an abolitionist, ain't you?" he added, squaring himself with both hands on his rifle, used for a staff, and gazing in the herb-doctor's face with no more reverence than if it were a target. "You are an abolitionist, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... 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 ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... always worked together. They were in great part composed of the same persons. In fact, the historical origin of the women's suffrage movement was a large abolition meeting held in England, but attended by many women delegates from America, where they excluded a leading American woman abolitionist and would only allow her husband to take her seat in her place. We shall, of course, consider this precise question later, and pause now merely to note the fact that with the anti-slavery movement, ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... black an Abolitionist," said he, "that I'd be willing to shoulder a gun any minute if I thought I could wipe ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... throbbing, heaving, agonized breast. I have no respect for a man who considered a lash on the naked back as a legal tender for labor performed. So write it down, Thomas Paine was the first great abolitionist of America. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... me to the animadversion of many worthy individuals; but I beg to assure them, that I am as zealous an abolitionist as any among my fellow subjects, although I widely differ from many of them, as to the means of effecting a measure, that embraces so large a portion of the human race; and I should contradict the conviction of my own mind, were I ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... draft a constitution legalizing slavery the people of Northern antecedents made their votes tell and defeated the project. But, like other parts of the Northwest, this State never became a unit on the slavery issue. Certainly it never became abolitionist. By an almost unanimous vote the Legislature, in 1837, adopted joint resolutions which condemned abolitionism as "more productive of evil than of moral and political good"; and in Congress in the preceding year the delegation of the State had given solid support to the ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... said something concerning slavery offensive to the people, and they had called a meeting of the citizens, and he had been driven out of town and ordered never to return. They had, furthermore, resolved that no abolitionist should thereafter be allowed to preach in the city. These brethren explained that, as I would be called on and interrogated by a committee, they thought it would be better that this should be done by friends, than that I should ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... my hands, and then I want a real Yankee to run the machine for me; not one of your New Yorkers or Pennsylvanians, but the genuine article from Massachusetts or Vermont—one who can not only farm, but sing psalms and pray, and teach school—a real abolitionist, who believes in the thing just as I don't believe in it. If he does not succeed, I shall consider it proof conclusive that you are wrong and ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... Brougham, her illustrious advocate, had for ten years been the main hope and stay of the movement against Slavery and the Slave Trade; while the John Bull, whose special mission it was to write her down, honoured the Abolitionist party with its declared animosity. However full its columns might be of libels upon the honour of the wives and daughters of Whig statesmen, it could always find room for calumnies against Mr. Macaulay which in ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... born near Haverhill, Massachusetts, December 17, 1807. He was educated in the public school, working at the same time on his father's farm or at making shoes. Having left the academy, he devoted himself to literature. He was an ardent abolitionist, and many of his poems are written to aid the cause of freedom in which he was so deeply interested. His best-known poems are "Snow-Bound," "Barbara Frietchie," "Maude Muller," and "Voices of Freedom." He died ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... parties in the South were agreed, and the vast majority of the people of the North—before the war. The abolitionist proper was considered not so much the friend of the negro as the enemy of society. As the war went on, and the abolitionist saw the "glory of the Lord" revealed in a way he had never hoped for, he saw at the same time, or rather ought to have seen, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... Going to the Right House," Lincoln is represented as entering the Lunatic Asylum, riding on a rail, carried by Horace Greeley, the great Abolitionist; Lincoln, followed by his "fellow-cranks," is assuring the latter that the millennium is "going to begin," and that all ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... him loyalty and patriotism, and before his time is out, we will make him an abolitionist," replied Captain Benson. "What will his ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... life and work of this great and good man, but I desire to say a few words in regard to his connection with the anti-slavery movement, and his interest in the work of the American Missionary Association. He was an original Abolitionist, and one of the most pronounced even in the early years of the agitation in his opposition to the wickedness of slavery, and in later years the cause of the elevation of the freedman had no stronger nor better friend ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 3, July, 1900 • Various
... respectable and highly cultivated people, with a great deal of money among them," writes Sterling in the end of February; "who make the place pleasant to me. They are connected with all the large Quaker circle, the Gurneys, Frys, &c., and also with Buxton the Abolitionist. It is droll to hear them talking of all the common topics of science, literature, and life, and in the midst of it: 'Does thou know Wordsworth?' or, 'Did thou see the Coronation?' or 'Will thou take some refreshment?' They are very kind ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... had been a crank, too, in his day, so far as to have gone counter to the most respectable feeling of business in Boston, when he came out an abolitionist. His individual impulse to radicalism had exhausted itself in that direction; we are each of us good for only a certain degree of advance in opinion; few men are indefinitely progressive; and Hilary had not caught on to the movement that was carrying his son with it. But ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... more diligent student and an abler practitioner of the law. But two such positive personalities could not long work in harmony, so in 1843 Lincoln formed a partnership with William H. Herndon, a man of abolitionist inclinations who remained Lincoln's junior partner until Lincoln's death and became his biographer. But they were very poor. The struggle was hard, and Lincoln and his bride were of necessity very frugal. In 1841 he might have had the nomination for ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... their being the amazing force of his personal presence. He could control an audience by a look, and could extort applause from hostile listeners by a mere glance. On one occasion, after the 7th of March speech, there is a story that a noted abolitionist leader was present in the crowd gathered to hear Mr. Webster, and this bitter opponent is reported to have said afterwards, "When Webster, speaking of secession, asked 'what is to become of me,' I was thrilled with a sense of some awful ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... or modification. At this meeting Judge Morris made a speech in which he said that a demand had been made for arms seized in Indiana (as Col. Walker had proposed to do), and if the demand failed, the revolution would be begun in Indiana "as sure as there was a God in heaven or an abolitionist ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... 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 ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... representing both the extreme anti-slavery wing of the Democrats and the organized Free-Soil party. The most famous of these names were those of Chase and Sumner, both of whom had been sent to the Senate by a coalition of Free-Soilers and Democrats. With them was the veteran abolitionist, Giddings of Ohio. The "Appeal" denounced Douglas as an "unscrupulous politician" and sounded both the warcries of the Northern masses by accusing him of being engaged in "an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... guarded, that escape appeared impossible. In the meanwhile Captain Harding was rejoined by a servant who was devoted to him in life and in death. This intrepid fellow was a Negro born on the engineer's estate, of a slave father and mother, but to whom Cyrus, who was an Abolitionist from conviction and heart, had long since given his freedom. The once slave, though free, would not leave his master. He would have died for him. He was a man of about thirty, vigorous, active, clever, intelligent, gentle, ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne |
