Attitude Toward Slavery
The Carroll family were slaveholders, and Charles Carroll was himself a substantial and wealthy planter. Like many southerners, Carroll was opposed in principle to slavery, asking rhetorically "Why keep alive the question of slavery? It is admitted by all to be a great evil". However, although he supported its gradual abolition, he did not free his own slaves, perhaps fearing that they might be rendered destitute in the process. Carroll introduced a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in the Maryland senate but it did not pass. In 1828, aged 91, he served as president of the Auxiliary State Colonization Society of Maryland, the Maryland branch of the American Colonization Society, an organization dedicated to returning black Americans to lead free lives in African states such as Liberia.
Read more about this topic: Charles Carroll Of Carrollton
Famous quotes containing the words attitude toward, attitude and/or slavery:
“I read ... an article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children to be skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.”
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“I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.”
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