“You say you are fighting for liberty. Yes you are fighting for liberty: liberty to keep four millions of your fellow-beings in ignorance and degradation;– liberty to separate parents and children, husband and wife, brother and sister;– liberty to steal the products of their labor, exacted with many a cruel lash and bitter tear;– liberty to seduce their wives and daughters, and to sell your own children into bondage;– liberty to kill these children with impunity, when the murder cannot be proven by one of pure white blood. This is the kind of liberty– the liberty to do wrong– which Satan, Chief of the fallen Angels, was contending for when he was cast into Hell.”

David Hunter, letter to Jefferson Davis https://books.google.com/books?id=Jc8VCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA59 (1863)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "You say you are fighting for liberty. Yes you are fighting for liberty: liberty to keep four millions of your fellow-be…" by Jefferson Davis?
Jefferson Davis photo
Jefferson Davis 44
President of the Confederate States of America 1808–1889

Related quotes

David Hunter photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“An individual may, indeed, forfeit his liberty by a crime; but he cannot by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

September 23, 1777, p. 363
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol III
Context: It must be agreed that in most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man. It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion. An individual may, indeed, forfeit his liberty by a crime; but he cannot by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children.

Samuel Johnson photo
John Hospers photo

“If each human being is to have liberty, he cannot also have the liberty to deprive others of their liberty.”

John Hospers (1918–2011) American philosopher and politician

Source: Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow, (1971), p. 13

Maximilien Robespierre photo
Horace Bushnell photo
Adam Smith photo

“Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter VIII, p. 87.

Lewis H. Lapham photo

“By the word "liberty" they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 2, Protocols of Wealth, p. 33

Related topics