Look into any history book on slavery and freedom, and you will likely not come across the roots to all worldwide slavery, or the psychological roots which ever gave rise to it’s numerous justifications that led to it’s prolongation. However, there were many historic figures that may deserve recognition, now that we may be able to look at the past with great mystery as to “how could we have ever done that?” In a world in need of it’s freedom today, also midst the struggles of technology, let us understand the powerful words of 19th Century American abolitionist Stephen Pearl Andrews:
First, we may learn that freedom must correlate with responsibility. “It cannot be rightly said that any man has a right to do wrong; but every man has the right to the freedom to do wrong. In other words, he has the right not to be interfered with in the exercise of his own judgment of right, although it may lead him to do what all the world pronounce wrong, provided only that he acts at his own cost, that is, that he do not throw the burdensome consequences of his acts on others.”
Second, we may learn that freedom must correlate with self-ownership. “Individual property is based on the right of the Individual to the products of his own labor. But if the product of my labour is my own, no one can decide the terms on which I shall part with it but myself. The right of exchanging it at pleasure is involved in the right of ownership. The attempt to establish a compulsory law for this purpose is a gross violation of my acknowledged Sovereignty”
Third, we may learn that freedom must correlate with voluntaryism or voluntary action or voluntary hierarchy, not statism or government or involuntary hierarchy. “Government of all sorts is adverse to freedom. It destroys the freedom of the subject, directly, by virtue of the fact that he is a subject; and destroys equally the freedom of the governor, indirectly, by devolving on him the necessity of overlooking and attempting, hopelessly, to regulate the conduct of others,—a task never yet accomplished, and the attempt at which is sufficiently harassing to wear the life out of the most zealous advocate of order.”
Other Abolitionists include the Foster family, particularly Abby Foster and Stephen Foster. Abby shares with us the moral underpinning of the work to create freedom:
“Our own moral destruction is consequent upon our leaving slavery to go on.”
“All the great family of mankind are bound up in one bundle. When we aim a blow at our neighbor’s rights our own are by the same blow destroyed. Can we look upon the wrongs of millions - can we see their flow of tears and grief and blood, and not feel our hearts drawn out in sympathy?”
Stephen Foster, as similar to Stephen Pearl Andrews, Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren and many others, he shares with us the greater problem of government in relation to slavery, as the untaught connection which historians dare not to address:
The U.S government is “a wicked and nefarious conspiracy against the liberty of more than two million of our countrymen.” Northerners who supported the government were “the basest of slaves, the vilest of hypocrites and the most execrable of man-stealers, inasmuch as they voluntarily consent to be the watch-dogs of the plantation.”
“Slaveholding was, necessarily, a social crime; that it was only by means of a social organization, by which the power of a whole community could be combined and concentrated on a given point, at a given time, that the liberty of an individual could be crushed. The federal and state governments, linked together as they now are, constitute such an organization.”
“The army, the navy, and the militia, of the whole country, are placed at the bidding of the slave power; and every officer in them, from the highest to the lowest, is put under oath to fight the battles of slavery at the master's call.”
“They preach and practice allegiance to a government which is based upon the bones and sinews, and cemented with the blood, of millions of their countrymen, and hold themselves in readiness to execute its every decree, at the point of the bayonet. Thus emphatically are they the holders of the slaves — the bulwarks of the bloody slave system”
Learn much more from Slavery Gone For Good: Black Book Edition