Slavery
Though some Reform institutions criticize Isaac Mayer Wise for his silence on the issue of slavery this characterization of "silence" is misinformed.
In an article from 1864, Isaac Mayer Wise wrote, "We are not prepared, nobody is, to maintain it is absolutely unjust to purchase savages, or rather, their labor, place them under the protection of law, and secure them the benefit of civilized society and their sustenance for their labor. Man in a savage state is not free; the alien servant under the Mosaic law was a free man, excepting only the fruits of his labor. The abstract idea of liberty is more applicable to the alien labor of the Mosaic system than to the savage, and savages only will sell themselves or their offspring. Negro slavery, if it could have been brought under the control of the Mosaic or similar laws, must have tended to the blessing of the negro race by frequent emigration of civilized negroes back to the interior of Africa; and even now that race might reap the benefit of its enslaved members, if the latter or the best instructed among them were sent back to the interior of Africa."
Though, this quote is taken from an article where Wise opened stating, "It is evident that Moses was opposed to slavery..." The article itself, entitled On the Provisional Portion of the Mosaic Code, with Special Reference to Polygamy and Slavery defends the Mosaic form of slavery as found in the Hebrew Bible while at the same time offering certain criticisms.
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Famous quotes containing the word slavery:
“These semi-traitors [Union generals who were not hostile to slavery] must be watched.—Let us be careful who become army leaders in the reorganized army at the end of this Rebellion. The man who thinks that the perpetuity of slavery is essential to the existence of the Union, is unfit to be trusted. The deadliest enemy the Union has is slavery—in fact, its only enemy.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Clay answered the petition by declaring that while he looked on the institution of slavery as an evil, it was ‘nothing in comparison with the far greater evil which would inevitably flow from a sudden and indiscriminate emancipation.’”
—State of Indiana, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)