"Abolitionism" Quotes from Famous Books
... come from Maine or Georgia, you come from a slave-state, and a slave-pen, where the best breeds are to be bought up at any price from a livelihood to the Presidency. Abolitionism, ye gods, but expresses the fellow-feeling ... — The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... about the minority. And it is this superstition of seriousness that constitutes the most solid obstacle and exception to the general and almost conventional pressure of public opinion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as was Abolitionism before the Civil War, or Pro-Germanism in the Great War, or the suggestion of racial admixture in the South at all times, then the fad meets far less mercy than anywhere else in the world; it is snowed under ... — What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... to present this observation, for nothing perverts our judgment of the American crisis more than the inexact definitions which are given of abolitionism. We willingly picture abolitionists to ourselves as madmen, seeking to attain their end on the spot, regardless of all else, through blood and ruin! That there may be such is possible, is even inevitable; but the men who exercise any political influence over the North ... — The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... to reform the Democratic party of Kansas, and to strengthen the Democratic party of the nation against the assaults and dangers of "abolitionism," the Governor was not entirely frank; else he would at the same time have reported, what he was obliged later to explain, that the steps taken to form a constitution from which he hoped so much were already vitiated by such defects or frauds as to render them impossible of producing good fruit. ... — Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... gratitude towards those masters is so extraordinary, that they will take arms against their brothers already in the field, and not be liable to commit the slight error of passing over and fighting by their side? In either case, Mr. Davis's proposition, if carried out, is practical abolitionism; and we have yet to learn how a tottering edifice can be rendered any more stable by the removal of its acknowledged "cornerstone." The plan is violently opposed by the slave-owning classes: for, whatever may be proclaimed to the contrary, they have risked this war, ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
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