CAUTION!!
COLORED PEOPLE
OF BOSTON, ONE & ALL
You are hereby respectfully CAUTIONED and
advised, to avoid conversing with the
Watchmen and Police Officers
of Boston,
For since the recent ORDER OF THE MAYOR &
ALDERMEN, they are empowered to act as
KIDNAPPERS
AND
Slave Catchers,
And they have already been actually employed in KIDNAPPING, CATCHING AND KEEPING SLAVES. Therefore, if you value your LIBERTY, and the Welfare of the Fugitives among you, Shun them in every possible manner, as so many HOUNDS on the track of the most unfortunate of your race.
Keep a Sharp Look Out for KIDNAPPERS, and have TOP EYE open.
APRIL 24, 1851. Theodore Parker’s placard.

—1851

“. . . If, then, we persist in war, which, if it terminates in anything short of a mere wanton waste of blood as well as money, must end (as this bill proposes) in the acquisition of territory, to which at once this controversy must attach—this bill would seem to be nothing less than a bill to produce internal commotion. Should we prosecute this war another moment, or expend one dollar in the purchase or conquest of a single acre of Mexican land, the North and the South are brought into collision on a point where neither will yield.”

–Senator Thomas Corwin (Ohio), speech in the Senate, February 11, 1847

“I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm . . . [U]rge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD. . .”

–William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, 1831

–David Walker

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? . . . To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.”

–Frederick Douglass, Independence Day Speech, Rochester, New York (1841)

“The existence of slavery impairs the industry and the power of a nation; and it does so in proportion to the multiplication of its slaves . . .

“If slavery be permitted in Missouri, with the climate and soil and in the circumstances of this territory, what hope can be entertained that it will ever be prohibited in any of the new states that will be formed in the immense region west of the Mississippi?”

–Senator Rufus King, Nile’s Weekly Register, December 4, 1819

“Rob us of our just portion of the territory which has been jointly purchased by the treasures of the nation and the valley of the Mississippi will be settled by the sons of the Eastern people, the inheritors of their fathers' prejudices . . .
     “And when they have succeeded in excluding from the Western settlements every Southern man, and shall have sent forth in every direction swarms from the Northern hive, and missionary preachers against the cruelties and inhumanities of Southern slavery, a universal emancipation may be the next scheme suggested by visionary philanthropists or promoted by designing politicians.”

–Anonymous, Richmond Enquirer, December 23, 1819

“I have favored this Missouri Compromise, believing it to be all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as a bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should have terminated in a convention of the states to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States, unpolluted with slavery, . . . . If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break. . . .”

–John Quincy Adams, March 3, 1820

“Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the Act of Congress [the Missouri Compromise] which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void; and that neither Dred Scott himself, nor any of his family, were made free by being carried into this territory; even if they had been carried there by the owner, with the intention of becoming a permanent resident. . . .”

–Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, decision on Dred Scott v. Sandford, March 6, 1857

“. . . Can the people of a territory in any lawful way, against the wishes of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a state constitution? . . . [T]he people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere unless it is supported by local police regulations. Those police regulations can only be established by the local legislature, and, if the people are opposed to slavery, they will elect representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst. . . .”

–Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln–Douglas debate, August 27, 1858

–Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln–Douglas Debates, 1858

“As a necessity, not a choice, we have resorted to the remedy of separation, and henceforth our energies must be directed to the conduct of our own affairs, . . . If a just perception of mutual interest shall permit us peaceably to pursue our separate political career my most earnest desire will have been fulfilled. But if this be denied to us . . . [we will be forced] to appeal to arms. . . .”

–February 18, 1861

“Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country can not do this. . . .
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.”

–March 4, 1861

–Daniel Webster, speech in Congress, 1850

–Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina