And Now a Few Words

"As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man."

"The Quakers are the only people who retain a fondness for their own mode of worship; for be they ever so far separated from each other, they hold a sort of communion with the society, and seldom depart from its rules, at least in this country.  Thus all sects are mixed as well as all nations; thus religious indifference is imperceptible disseminated from one end of the continent to the other; which is at present one of the strongest characteristics of the Americans."

"The Names of Virtues with their Precepts were...
...
12. Chastity.  Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring; Never to Dullness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another's Peace or Reputation.
13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates."

"That Felicity, when I reflected on it, has induc'd me sometimes to say, that were it offer'd to my Choice, I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from it's Beginning, only asking the Advantage of Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first."

"A slave, by escaping to a free state, acquires certain important rights and privileges. When he reaches our territory, we regard him as a man and not as property."

"More familiar is Cole's Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), painted in 1836 and viewed from the top of Mount Holyoke.  Holyoke was one of the first of the mountaintops to be frequented by tourists; a hut to accommodate travelers was erected there as early as 1821.  As in the previous work, Cole organizes the main axis of the composition along a diagonal line of sight starting from the left foreground and culminating in the right middle ground.  Cole again deploys the left foreground in a repoussoir fashion, standing for the wilderness past with its desolate blasted trees, while beyond this darkened zone lies the sun-filled valley of the Connecticut River with its fertile meadow and terraced fields leading 'to one of the most sunny and cheerful villages in Massachusetts.'"

"Inevitably the seeds of destruction are present even at the moment of the empire's triumph.  The returning victor's subjugation of neighbouring states indicates an empire acquired through territorial aggression (in contrast, perhaps, to the expansion of the United States at least in part by treaties and by financial transactions such as the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but prefiguring the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, which Cole abhorred) and liable to future rebellion."

"Unfortunately, there were men in the new world, of a sterner faith than these May-Pole worshippers. Not far from Merry Mount was a settlement of Puritans, most dismal wretches, who said their prayers before daylight, and then wrought in the forest or the cornfield, till evening made it prayer time again. Their weapons were always at hand, to shoot down the straggling savage. When they met in conclave, it was never to keep up the old English mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long, or to proclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of Indians. Their festivals were fast-days, and their chief pastime the singing of psalms. Woe to the youth or maiden, who did but dream of a dance! The selectman nodded to the constable; and there sat the light-heeled reprobate in the stocks; or if he danced, it was round the whipping-post, which might be termed the Puritan May-Pole."

"Yet the state is nothing artificial, nothing made, that may or may not be adopted. It is necessary, and therefore natural, grown, and indispensable. It is a necessary manifestation of society. If we now call right, that which indicates man's relation to the state, or that which is the necessary consequence of his relations founded on the just, toward others, that which the state is bound to grant him, punishment is the right between society and the offender, or, however paradoxical it may appear at first glance, the right both of the society and the offender. But why is it so? Merely because it is necessary, and farther we cannot go? By no means. In order to prove that punishment be what we have asserted it to be, we have to show first that it be just, secondly that it be necessary. All idea of the just is essentially founded upon equality; without it, as its first foundation, justice cannot be imagined. Every individual in the state must grant to others the right he claims for himself: if he interferes with the rightful state of others, he grants them the abstract right to interfere with his."

"But I shall no longer detain my reader from his expected entertainment in the a brief account of the trials which have passed upon some of the malefactors lately executed at Salem, for the witchcrafts whereof they stood convicted."

"...Mr. Cotton Mather dined with us, and was with me in the new Kitchen when this was; He had just been mentioning that more Minister Houses that others proportionably had been smitten with Lightening; enquiring what the meaning of God should be in it."

"Very likely more than half the population of the plantation is gathered together. Let it be the evening, and a light-wood fire burns red before the door of the house and on the hearth. For some time one can hear, though at a good distance, the vociferous exhortation or prayer of the presiding elder or of the brother who has a gift that way, and who is not 'on the back seat,'--a phrase, the interpretation of which is, 'under the censure of the church authorities for bad behavior;'--and at regular intervals one bears the elder 'deaconing' a hymn-book hymn, which is sung two lines at a time, and whose wailing cadences, borne on the night air, are indescribably melancholy"

"These are the songs that are still heard upon the Mississippi steamboats--wild and strangely fascinating--one of which we have been so fortunate as to secure for this collection. This, too, is no doubt the music of the colored firemen of Savannah, graphically described by Mr. Kane O'Donnel, in a letter to the Philadelphia Press, and one of which he was able to contribute for our use. Mr. E. S. Philbrick was struck with the resemblance of some of the rowing tunes at Port-Royal to the boatmen's songs he had heard upon the Nile."

"The Boston Post made it official: 'The two most popular characters in the world at the present time [1838] are Victoria and Jim Crow.'"

"Was not Christ crucified. And by signs in the heavens that it would make known to me when I should commence the great work—and until the sign appeared, I should conceal it from the knowledge of men—And in the appearance of the sign, (the eclipse of the sun last February) I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons."

"By nature trees do rot when they are grown
And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown to have so short a date,
Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate."

"They tell us of the Israelites in Egypt, the Helots in Sparta, and of the Roman Slaves, which last were made up from almost every nation under heaven, whose sufferings under those ancient and heathen nations, were, in comparison with ours, under this enlightened and Christian nation, no more than a cypher—or, in other words, those heathen nations of antiquity, had but little more among them than the name and form of slavery; while wretchedness and endless miseries were reserved, apparently in a phial, to be poured out upon our fathers, ourselves and our children, by Christian Americans!"

"The pearl fishers dive into the sea at a depth of five fathoms, and do this from sunrise to sunset, and remain for many minutes without breathing, tearing the oysters out of their rocky beds where the pearls are formed. They come to the surface with a netted bag of these oysters where a Spanish torturer is waiting in a canoe or skiff, and if the pearl diver shows signs of wanting to rest, he is showered with blows, his hair is pulled, and he is thrown back into the water, obliged to continue the hard work of tearing out oysters and bringing them again to the surface."

"Religious peoples and trading nations entertain peculiarly serious notions of marriage: the former consider the regularity of woman's life as the best pledge and most certain sign of the purity of her morals; the latter regard it as the highest security for the order and prosperity of the household. The Americans are at the same time a puritanical people and a commercial nation: their religious opinions, as well as their trading habits, consequently lead them to require much abnegation on the part of woman, and a constant sacrifice of her pleasures to her duties which is seldom demanded of her in Europe. Thus in the United States the inexorable opinion of the public carefully circumscribes woman within the narrow circle of domestic interests and duties, and forbids her to step beyond it."