Wiek reform

“[W]e believe and affirm: That every American citizen who retains a human being in involuntary bondage as his property is (according to Scripture) a MAN STEALER. That the slaves ought instantly to be set free. . . . That all those laws which are now in force admitting the right of slavery, are . . ., before God, utterly null and void, being an audacious usurpation of the Divine prerogative. . . . [T]hat no compensation should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves and not to those who have plundered and abused them. [That] we concede the Congress under the resent national compact, has no right to interfere with any of the slave states, in relation to this momentous subject [slavery]. But we maintain that Congress has a right. . . to suppress the domestic slave trade between the slave states, and to abolish slavery in those portions of our territory which the Constitution has placed under its exclusive jurisdiction.”

-Source: William Lloyd Garrison, “Declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention,” 1834