“John Brown knew the masters secretly feared their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners feared their slaves might join him.”

— James W. Loewen , book Lies My Teacher Told Me

As quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong https://books.google.com/books?id=5m2_xeJ4VdwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=lies+my+teacher+told+me&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dV39VNWyPMmWgwTN14JQ&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=maltreated&f=false (2008), p. 193
2000s, 2007, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (2007)
Context: Ideas made the opposite impact in the Confederacy. Ideological contradictions afflicted the slave system even before the war began. John Brown knew the masters secretly feared their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners feared their slaves might join him. Yet their condemnations of Brown and the 'Black Republicans' who financed him did not persuade Northern moderates but only pushed them toward the abolitionist camp. After all, if Brown was truly dangerous, as slave owners claimed, then slavery was truly unjust. Happy slaves would never revolt... White Southerners founded the Confederacy on the ideology of white supremacy. Confederate soldiers on their way to Antietam and Gettysburg, their two main forays into Union states, put this ideology into practice: they seized scores of free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sold them south into slavery. Confederates maltreated black Union troops when they captured them.

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James W. Loewen 17

American historian 1942

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 56

“Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Letter to Alexander H. Stephens (1860)

“His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time. His stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for the slave.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Regarding John Brown, as quoted in A Lecture On John Brown http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mfd&fileName=22/22002/22002page.db&recNum=9&tempFile=./temp/~ammem_rvc6&filecode=mfd&next_filecode=mfd&prev_filecode=mfd&itemnum=2&ndocs=32

“If the slave-owner of our times has no slave, John, whom he can send to the cesspool, he has five shillings, of which hundreds of such Johns are in such need that the slave-owner of our times may choose any one out of hundreds of Johns and be a benefactor to him by giving him the preference, and allowing him, rather than another, to climb down into the cesspool.”

Leo Tolstoy book The Slavery of Our Times

Source: The Slavery of Our Times (1890), Chapter 8: Slavery Exists Among Us

“When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

The He-Ancient, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

“The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Obsessive gambling is now regarded as a mental illness - but, argues Theodore Dalrymple, does that not mean that the Disability Discrimination Act makes it illegal for bookies to discriminate against obsessive gamblers by banning them from their shops? http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001721.php (February 19, 2008).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Their Morals and Ours (1938)
Context: (On the American Civil War) "History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"

“We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.
"Extreme Behavior in Aspen" (3 February 2003)
2000s

“I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs”

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) American politician

Statement at the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention (July 1837), quoted in Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (1959) by Fawn M. Brodie, p. 63
1830s
Context: I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom.

“The political idealism of the Revolution also encouraged, and sometimes forced, white slave owners to liberate their slaves.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

Source: 2010s, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012), Chapter One

“John Brown knew the masters secretly feared their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners feared their slaves might join him.”

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