so I've mentioned John wolman before I think but before the American Revolution very few people oppose slavery uh it just wasn't a movement at all there were isolated people he was one of them who is well known woman was a Quaker uh he he traveled through the uh through Virginia and maybe even other Southern States Maryland and he wrote about his experiences and he argued with slave owners who he met along the way about the morality of slavery he thought that Liberty was a natural right that all people had and the slavery then was a violation of your natural rights and anti-slavery sentiment was common among Quakers but not among very many other people until the American Revolution during the American Revolution anti-slavery sentiment spread and you begin to see the creation of anti-slavery movements for the first time in the United States and and for the first time in many parts of the western world uh During the Revolution slaves fought on both sides of the War uh they fought for the Patriots the American side they fought for the Loyalists which is the British side and there were thousands of them were given the freedom in exchange for fighting uh about 5 000 at least fought on the Patriot side and maybe 10 000 on the Loyola side also slaves in the northern colonies petitioned the legislatures for their freedom and some of those petitions sort of paid off indirectly at least in the northern colonies so I have mentioned I think the petition to the general assembly of Connecticut uh this was a famous one it was written by Prime and Prime x uh these were two slaves who were almost certainly illiterate so someone else amass a Connecticut abolitionist I guess wrote it for them and then they signed it Prime and primex but what was interesting about it uh was that um the language and the arguments they used they said that it was wrong to condemn them to Perpetual slavery without any crime on their part so they haven't done anything as individuals to deserve this status um they pointed out the hypocrisy between uh the rhetoric of the independence the Declaration of Independence they said the the cause for Liberty which whose conduct excites the admiration and reverence of all the great empires of the world while continuing this detestable practice in other words they pointed out the hypocrisy of claiming to fight for human Liberty human Freedom while also holding slaves they pointed out that even though their skins were different in color from those of their masters they said reason and Revelation joined to declare that we are the creatures of that God who made of one blood and Kindred all the nations of the world of the Earth so they're using religion and uh the Christian belief that almost everybody in America at that time held to buttress their arguments that they don't deserve to be enslaved uh that they are of one blood and Kindred meaning they're the same race right the same Human family as their owners they also said we are endowed with the same faculties with our masters and by faculties they met we have the same brains that they do we have the same Minds we're so we're not inferior is what they were claiming so they said The more we consider of this matter the more we are convinced of our right by the laws of nature and by the whole tenor of the Christian religion so far as we have been taught to be free we have endeavored rightly to understand what is our right and what is our duty and can never be convinced that we were made to be slaves so notice I say the laws of nature and the whole tender of Christian religion they're appealing to science and they're saying if you study the laws of nature who use reason then you deduce that we should be free because we are the same you know human stuff that our masters are or if you use religion Revelation they call it you get to the same conclusion we should be free so this document um I don't know how much of an impact this exact document had but Connecticut like all the other slaves all the other northern states did abolish slavery slavery either immediately or gradually during this revolutionary era so anti-slavery organizations sprang up in the 1770s and 1780s and 1790s and the northern states all abolished slavery by 1804 Vermont was the first this was in 1777. and that makes Vermont I think the first the first state or government in the Western World to abolish slavery entirely by Western world I mean the Western Hemisphere right the very first completely abolished slavery and then Pennsylvania followed in 1780 Massachusetts followed in 1783 I don't remember if I told you this but John Adams wrote the Massachusetts constitution in 1780 and the first line of it said something like all men are by Nature free and equal and a slave in Massachusetts uh sued his owner and said the Massachusetts Constitution says in the first line all men are by Nature free and equal so that means slavery is unconstitutional in Massachusetts it's illegal well the Massachusetts Supreme Court agreed and that was the end of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783. uh in 1783 New York New Hampshire began the gradual abolition of slavery and then Connecticut and Rhode Island the next year uh New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804. so by the you know early 1800s slavery was on the path to Extinction in the northern states I have mentioned the Northwest Ordinance it banned slavery and these new territories that would become States Ohio Indiana Illinois Michigan and Wisconsin remember Thomas Jefferson wanted to ban slavery in all the new territories west of the Mississippi and west of the Appalachians excuse me uh and his effort to do so failed by one vote in the Continental Congress and how different American history would be if they had gotten that vote uh things would be radically different dramatically different I think it's hard to say so there were constitutional compromises on slavery the Three-Fifths compromises uh famous because it said that for purposes of Taxation and congressional representation slaves would count as the equal of three free persons but that was really about how to count slaves not slavery itself um more I think directly related to slavery there was a slave trade compromise there were many who wanted to ban the slave trade the international slave trade right then and they couldn't get the support in the Congress to do that in the constitutional convention uh so they agreed on a compromise they would postpone a ban for 20 years and then in 1807 I think it was up Congress passed the law Jefferson signed it and at the beginning of 1808 the international slave trade was banned perhaps the most important uh and the most troubling compromise with slavery though was the Fugitive Slave clause it said this no person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof escaping into another shall and consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due notice they don't use the word slavery or Slave at any point in that passage they don't use the word slave or slavery at any point in the document the Constitution and later people like Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln would point that out as an example as a suggestion that the founding fathers were deeply uncomfortable with the practice and didn't even want to name it in the Constitution but this was clearly about slavery so what it says is if a slave escapes from a slave state to a state that is banned slavery the state where slavery is abolished has to return the fugitive to his or her owners and the slave state this was controversial all the way up to the Civil War the free states didn't like it and some of them uh tried to oppose it tried to not uh follow through on this constitutional obligation to return fugitive slaves and so it was controversial all the way up until the 1850s now one of the early attempts anti-slavery um movements uh can be seen with the American Colonization Society it was created in 1816 it was created many of the uh prominent politicians even founding fathers uh even slave owners were members of the American Colonization Society and what this organization had in mind was first of all uh the members believe that slavery was evil we should be eradicated but they thought it could only be done so gradually and with the cooperation of slaveholders so what they wanted to do was make a system where slave holders could be compensated for their slaves like slaves could be their freedom could be purchased and then the slaves would colonize some other place they would not stay in Virginia or Maryland or where they were originally from this is a lot like what Thomas Jefferson always thought was the only way to solve the problem with slavery in the United States um and many prominent Americans even Abraham Lincoln uh was in favor of this kind of a solution to the problem um so they established a colony in Africa called Liberia and that colony is a an African country to this day so it was founded by American slaves who were set free or had their freedom purchased and then they chose to accept free passage to Liberia and they founded that colony in the early 1820s this is a picture of Liberia from the 1800s what it looked like long ago the problem with the American Colonization Society was um it didn't really have any impact it was too small to have any impact on slavery at large the vast majority of free black people in America and slaves who became free had no interest in going back to Africa only about 12 000 people from the beginning of this Colonization Society up until 1860. only about twelve thousand chose to go so when you figure there were a quarter of a million free blacks in the north and another quarter of a million in the South 500 000 and hardly any of them wanted to move to Africa so this Society just wasn't very effective because of the lack of Interest most of these former slaves or free people thought of America as their home as their country and they preferred to stay here and fight for freedom and equality here so in 1820 a major crisis erupted that generated talk of secession and Civil War and all this kind of thing and it led to a compromise that sort of pacified a little bit the slavery anti-slavery controversy for about 30 years so the Missouri Compromise you can see Missouri in this map here uh the blue State just above above this red line so in 1817 the Missouri territory applied for Statehood and there were already about two or three thousand slaves there and this sparked a controversy will Missouri be admitted as a slave state or will be slavery or will slavery be banned a senator uh attached an amendment to the statehood bill the bill granting Missouri statehood it was called the Talmadge Amendment and it would have banned the introduction of more slaves into Missouri and emancipated the children of those already there and from the anti-slavery point of view that sounded like a perfectly reasonable compromise but the slave states desperately wanted Missouri to be introduced as a state where slavery was legal the slave states were worried about being outnumbered in the Senate and they thought that unless they preserved a balance in the Senate a balance of power with the same number of slave and free states in it that they would be powerless and everything would go against them in Congress and so that's why they desperately wanted Missouri to be a slave state rather than a free state uh the controversy was only solved when a compromise was worked out in 1820 and it allowed Missouri to come into this to the Union as a slave state so slavery would be legal there and Maine which you can see in the upper right hand corner here which had been a part of Massachusetts ever since colonial days was split off into a new state and this meant that one slave and one new state would come into the Union the balance would be preserved they would have exactly the same number of votes in the Senate and that compromise uh pacified the two sides a little bit the other part of the compromise was really important they drew a an imaginary line along the southern border of Missouri from east to west as far west as U.S territory extended and it only extended to about right here at that time in 1820. remember Texas and all of the Southwest was still part of Spain at this time so the Missouri Compromise line extended to somewhere around where Oklahoma would be today what they said was any new States any new territories north of this line would be free territories so all of this stuff that was part of the Louisiana Purchase that would eventually become Kansas Nebraska South Dakota North Dakota all of that would be free territory slavery would be illegal south of the line was really basically meant the Arkansas territory you can see here which would eventually become Arkansas and Oklahoma south of the line would be slave territory slavery would be legal there so they were deciding in 1820 just to divide up all the Territory between slave and free so they wouldn't have to go through this fight over and over and over again every time new territories applied for statement and that worked for about 30 years it worked in the sense that it just kept the senators from tearing each other apart let me skip this now around uh this time at some point in the 1800s or maybe even sooner but we think of it we tend to think of it in connection with the 1800s the Underground Railroad came to be and this was not a real official organization there wasn't some uh group called calling itself the underground robot there's more like a nickname for an informal Network that was organized by black and white abolitionists um and it helped somewhere between a hundred thousand to 130 000 slaves escape to Freedom and it was a network of churches run by Quakers and methodists and people who were anti-slavery and private homes again often the homes of Quakers and religious people who were anti-slavery and they would basically hide fugitive slaves feed them clothe them and then help them get to the next house or church on their path to eventual freedom and which usually meant like Canada or someplace far away from their original uh the place they were fled from [Music] um the typical fugitive who escaped along the Underground Railroad was a young unmarried male from the upper South and the reason for that was because first of all the upper South like Maryland Kentucky Virginia if you lived farther south than that you were just too far away from freedom to have a realistic chance of escaping um but the young unmarried male part of it is also interesting and important um if you were older if you were married if you were female which meant likely you had children then you had strong family ties that made it less likely that you would try to escape because you wouldn't want to leave kids Behind or a spouse behind uh or that sort of thing so it was young men in their 20s maybe or even younger who are more more likely to to risk it uh and Escape although of course there are exceptions many exceptions the most famous person who escaped and then worked on the Underground Railroad as this person here Harriet Tubman she was born in slavery in 1820 in Maryland same place Frederick Douglass was born just a couple of years after him she escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 and then she turned around and made 13 trips back into the South to free about 70 other slaves she also helped recruit men for John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 and she served in many capacities during the Civil War on the union side so she had quite an accomplished career now um yeah the Great Awakening and Abolitionist Movement so the Great Awakening was a religious revival that started sometime in the early 1800s maybe late 1700s early 1800s and it was a kind of Evangelical Revival where lots of people were would go to camp meetings uh the they would uh pray and listen to songs and listen to sermons and sing songs for days like going camping but for with a religious purpose in mind um and they would be converted by the hundreds or by the thousands you can see this picture of a camp meeting in the early 1800s and this is from Kentucky or Tennessee you can see the tents kind of pitched back there in a long row you can see the preachers on the platform and they're just going to be preaching and singing hymns and songs all day long this was very popular and it had tremendous impact on American history and American culture and one of the most important impacts from a non-religious point of view I mean from a religious point of view it had its impactness thousands of people were converted new denominations like methodism and baptism became more prominent that's when this is the time period when they became the most popular uh denominations in America but in a secular sense they also had a huge impact because many of these new converts took up reforms uh causes to fight for like um Temperance meaning anti-alcohol movements right anti-alcoholism uh stamping up prostitution um you know child poverty and child abuse and things like that and probably most important of all many of them turn to abolitionism many of them first became converted to some sort of Christian denomination and then followed that into fighting against the evils of slavery which they considered to be the greatest evil in America at the time um the man on the right is an example of this he's Charles Finney he was the most famous preacher of this time uh he preached in the 1820s 1830s he would go on to be the president of Oberlin College and Oberlin would be famous as a kind of a hotbed of abolitionism uh it it it a lot from the day it opened it allowed black and white students male and female students which is very unusual for the time but he denounced slavery from his pulpit uh in his sermons and in general he insisted that his followers serve others that they fought that they do good in society this is a quote from one of his speeches they meaning Christians they should set out with a determination to aim at being useful in the highest degree possible they should not rest satisfied with merely being useful or remaining in a situation where they can do some good but if they see an opportunity where they can do more good they must embrace it whatever may be the sacrifice to themselves now whatever it may cost to them no matter what danger or what suffering so he's encouraging his followers not justified against slavery but against all these other social problems as well this is a Theodore Dwight weld he was heavily influenced by Charles Finney he was from a long line of uh preachers but apparently in his youth he wasn't terribly religious until he heard a Finney sermon and he sort of went through two conversions the first was the conversion to Christianity under Finney and then the second right after that was like a conversion to anti-slavery to abolitionism and so he took up that cost and he set up his own sort of schools for anti-slavery speakers he would train men and women on how to be activists against slavery um and what they did was they basically modeled themselves after the church so they would have camp meetings with songs and sermons just like the religious camp meetings from the Second Great Awakening but instead of being uh about saving your soul and you know following God uh it would be about fighting slavery and the evils of slavery uh and then most of the people well almost all the people there were Christians already so this was like the next step to them um he started a school called Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati um or he actually I might have misspoken maybe he didn't start it but he was there he got kicked out because his anti-slavery radicalism was too much for them uh so he helped establish Oberlin College and that's the school I mentioned earlier that Charles Finney was the president of and Oberlin uh from the very beginning admitted black men and then within a couple of years was admitting men and women and was a center of abolitionism he met his wife who was Angelina Grimke if any of you watch the documentary on the Abolitionist you'll learn more about her uh it's a really interesting woman she and her sister Sarah were Southern were from South Carolina and they grew up on a plantation surrounded by slaves and they saw firsthand the brutality of slavery and they re and they being very religious thought this is evil we can't be associated with this um and so they fled they moved north um I don't know if they ever went back to South Carolina again they were told at one point that if they did they would be killed um so you know they probably didn't um but Angelina married Theodore Dwight Weld and then the two of them publish this book called American slavery as it is and it was a brilliant book for its time because all it did was compile first-hand accounts of what the slavery conditions of slavery were actually like they in a day before the internet before it was easy to do this sort of thing they found authentic examples from Southern newspapers and from Diaries and from uh narratives published by former slaves of the brutality and the evilness of slavery so that's what they call this American slavery as it is now the most important white abolitionists of the time was this man William Lloyd Garrison he was a uh his contribution first was that he published in 1831 in abolitionist newspaper called The Liberator and this Liberator this this newspaper was uh I mean free blacks and anti-slavery activists subscribe to it and got their news from it and so it was very influential and then in 1833 he founded something called the American anti-slavery Society and this was uh really the greatest anti-slavery organization leading up to the Civil War um and through this Society he reached and used the talents of people like Frederick Douglass and many others they would organize speeches against slavery and activism of different kinds now he was very radical um I'll give you a couple of examples of his radicalism he supported full participation of women in the movement which might sound like obvious and a no-brainer to you today but at the time it was widely thought that women should literally not speak uh at public meetings and that this was somehow controversial and uh he was against that so he took a group of anti-slavery activists to London in 1840 there was supposed to be a world anti-slavery convention and when they got there the organizers told them that the women in the American group couldn't participate and so he just said okay fine we're all going to sit out like if you don't accept all of us you don't none of us will participate um so he was very supportive of the women in the cause more radically perhaps he embraced a radical no government philosophy and what I mean by that is he decided at some point in the 1830s that the American Constitution was a wicked pro-slavery document that couldn't be saved and he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution uh to kind of show his disdain for it and that the American government in general the union was too corrupted by slavery and couldn't be safe he wanted the northern states the free states to secede and go their own way and just sort of wash their hands of the southern states and their slavery uh he also told but I think maybe a little bit contradictory he also told his followers not to vote not to participate in the political process at all because it was so corrupted that you would just pollute Yourself by involvement with it now there were different guys like Frederick Douglass who for a while was a very close friend and partner of Garrison disagreed with him on those things he came to believe that the constitution was basically an anti-slavery document even though it had its compromises with slavery that the American system was basically good and basically an anti-slavery system that should be preserved but you know cleansed of its slavery uh problems and Garrison stopped speaking to him and that was all pretty much the end of their friendship because Garrison was kind of so uh stubborn and uptight about wanting everything to be done his wife so I want to talk a little bit about Francis Ellen Watkins Harper she was a great example of the many free blacks in the north who were crucial to the anti-slavery movement um northern free blacks supported the movement financially they they subscribed to the magazines like the Liberator to the newspapers I mean they spoke at conventions they did all kinds of work and she's a great example she but she is a fascinating person just in her own right um she was born free in Baltimore Maryland sometime around 1825 if I remember correctly so interestingly remember Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland around 1818. Harriet Tubman was born a slave around 1820 she was born free so that's just a reminder what I told you in Maryland in Baltimore there were lots of free blacks and enslaved blacks co-mingling at the same time she may have even well she would have probably been too young but I was going to say she may have even known them uh it's not impossible but she was free and she became a great writer she published a collection of poems in 1854 that was the most successful poetry collection by an African-American until the 20th century until the 1900s so she was the most famous black American poet of her time um she published uh I think two or three novels so she was arguably the first successful the first great African-American female novelist as well um and of course she also became an abolitionist a suffragist which means someone who fought for the right to vote for women and she was a Temperance activist that means she fought against alcohol abuse alcoholism and those three often went together very often if you were one of those things you were the others as well anti-alcohol abuse anti-slavery and pro-women's rights and she was um I put this poem of hers bury me in a free land you may make my grave Wherever You Will in a lowly Veil or a lofty Hill you may make it among Earth's humblest Graves but not in a land where men are slaves she has lots of great great poems uh really worth looking into if you have a chance oh one last thing when the Civil War was over she was still fairly young right she was 40 years old she like a lot of other abolitionists a lot of women who were abolitionists she really put her money where her mouth was she moved to the south in 1865 so that she could volunteer to teach former slaves how to read and write and that sort of thing in schools that were being set up for them by the Freedmen's Bureau and this was dangerous work for women in the South right after the Civil War so she was one of many who did that this woman is another great and famous and interesting anti-slavery activists um and her story is just almost too crazy to believe um first of all she's better known today as Sojourner Truth but her original name was Isabella fountain-free and her nickname was Bill and so for most of her life for her first 30 or 40 years everyone called her Bell one of the things that's interesting about her is that she was born a slave in the state of New York so just before in 1799 New York passed the law gradually emancipating slaves and the rule was children born into slavery after this law was passed would be emancipated when they became adults so at the age of 18 or so and then and on July 4th 1827 anybody who was still a Slave at that point would be set free on that day and that was the law she was born in the 1790s so she was not one of those children who would be set free on her 18th birthday um she had several children who were slaves uh until they matured uh one of them led to an interesting court case um her master and the owner of her her son sold him illegally down south into slavery in Alabama before he could turn 18. and what the guy was trying to do was he was trying to capitalize and get some money for the son knowing that once he turned 18 he would be set free he would be emancipated by law and he would not get any money for him right and so the guy figured I'll sell them to somebody in Alabama get a couple of hundred bucks for him uh but then the poor kid has to be a slave the rest of his life in Alabama well that was illegal New York state had said you can't do that the intention of this law is to set these people free here not for you to just sell them into slavery in some other state she took the guy to court and she won the case and they got her son back from Alabama uh and he was set free in New York so that was pretty interesting another little interesting thing about her uh just as a kind of a tidbit a trivia question her first language wasn't English and she didn't speak English until she was a few years old and she spoke with an accent all her life uh can anyone guess what her first language really was great yes great guess well in that part of the country there are lots of French speakers it's close to Canada it's close to Quebec but not quite can you think of another group of Europeans who settled in the New York area not much not much there's another group that have much more significant impact on New York um if any of you remember I'll go way back here maybe when you're younger reading the stories of Sleepy Hollow and all that Ichabod Crane and that kind of stuff Dutch those stories are all set in Dutch neighborhoods in New York where Dutch settlers had arrived in the 1600s and they spoke Dutch there for hundreds of years and so she was from one of those Dutch communities and so her first language was Dutch like everybody else around her yes oh yes everybody everybody did the Dutch the French the Spanish the English the Indians even for uh some free blacks everybody has slaves um so now uh at some point in her 20s she had a religious conversion she became a born-again Christian uh and she actually I think she was later than her 20s it might have been 30s or 40s the age doesn't matter uh she became a devout Christian and she at this point in her life she was now free and she became an abolitionist she became an anti-slavery speaker and she became a speaker for women's rights uh such as the white the right to vote her most famous speech is the ain't I a woman speech and you may have heard that at some point or another and uh the irony of that is she might not have given that speech it might have been attributed to her because she was a famous person by then uh but the speech the reason why I don't know if it was really hers is the speech is given in a Southern accent and the accent that a southern black woman would use at that time but what I've told you today she wasn't a southerner and if anything her accent was a Dutch accent not an English one so some historians doubt whether or not she really gave that speech or maybe they just changed it to make it sound more stereotypically uh Southern here's another interesting person and I like to talk about him because I don't I doubt any of you have ever heard of him his name was James WC Pennington he was born a slave in Maryland and he escaped at the age of 19. he lived for a while with some Quakers in Pennsylvania and then he moved to New York and then at some point in his early 20s he became the first black student at Yale so that's imagine that accomplishment to go from being a slave to being a student at Yale with one of the two or three most prestigious uh colleges in the country he graduated from Yale he became a minister and he became the first black Pastor in many churches including all white churches where he would serve as the minister he wrote a book in 1841 called the origin and history of the colored people which I think is the first history book about African Americans written by an African-American I think uh and then he played an interesting role in the Amistad case which I'll get to in a minute he toured Europe and in the 1850s he uh protested against segregation on streetcars and New York City and I think that's interesting because when we think about protesting against segregation segregated buses segregated trains we think of it as a recent thing in the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the few people who was protesting against segregation in free states even before the Civil War and I mentioned Frederick Douglass the other day I want to say it's a little bit more about him uh Douglas escaped from slavery remember when he was about 20 years old or so something like that around 1838. he traveled quickly through Pennsylvania and New York settled and met and and Massachusetts for a while uh and he was living in a community of free blocks many of whom were fugitive slaves like himself he met William Lloyd Garrison in 1841. and Garrison talked him into giving his first anti-slavery speech and he was a huge hit I want to quote just one or two lines from SBT said I appear before the immense assembly this evening as a thief and a robber I stole this head these limbs this body from my master and ran off with them which I thought was kind of brilliant but literally it was true he was standing there a thief in possession of stolen property which was himself um or fugitive property he published his biography in 1845 was called The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American slave it was a bestseller for its time it sold about 11 000 copies within you know a year or two um and it is still many it's taught in schools Across America it's a brilliant book incredibly well written um and uh and uh very very interesting and he would go on for the next 10 or 20 years giving anti-slavery lecturers across the United States and Europe and Ireland and he became I would say he was the most important anti-slavery activist uh he and Garrison are kind of neck and neck for who had the greatest contributions to the Abolitionist Movement uh before the Civil War Douglas had one really fascinating speech that I want to give you a little bit of I want to introduce you to and the speech is I don't remember what it was originally called but everyone refers to it these days by what to the slave is the Fourth of July which is one of the lines from it so this is in 1852 and he was asked to give an address to the ladies of the Rochester anti-slavery sewing Society yeah so it sounds exciting all right um the speech was given on July 5th and so he took July 4th and the Independence Day Celebrations as his theme and he asked what to the slave is the fourth of July he said that the July 4th celebration of Liberty was an offense to the enslaved people because they lacked freedom and citizenship and he compared the slaves to the American colonists under British rule he declared that he admired the principles of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence the founding fathers fought for however he asked what have I or those I represent to do with your National Independence are the great principles of political freedom and of natural Justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us what to this to the American slave is your fourth of July I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year the gross Injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim foreign he also claimed that the institution of slavery corrupted the principles of Christianity and the Constitution he denied that the Bible was pro-slavery reminding his audience that it said that of one blood God made all nations of men to dwell in the face of all the Earth and that God commanded all men everywhere to love one another remember in the petition to Connecticut the slaves had said basically the same thing he denied that the constitution was pro-slavery he said take the Constitution according to its plain reading and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it on the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes entirely hostile to the existence of slavery standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion I will in the name of humanity which is outraged in the name of Liberty which is fettered and the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon dare to call in question and to denounce with all the emphasis I can command everything that serves to perpetuate slavery the great sin and shame of America now what's interesting if you read it carefully he does not say that America or the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence are bad not at all he says they're great what he says is though if you celebrate those things while you also have someone enslaved you're a hypocrite all right all right that's what we'll stop for today I'll see y'all next