Slavery

Works to read

• 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, 1853
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs, 1861
• Narrative of the Life and What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? by Frederick Douglass, 1845 / 1852
• Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, 1901 (serialized 1900-01)
• Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, 1688
• Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852 (serialized 1851-52)
• Dred Scott v. Sandford by Supreme Court of the United States, 1857
• The Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, 1 January 1863
• Selected Sermons by George Whitefield, 1739-1770
• Somerset v. Stewart (Somerset's Case) by Lord Mansfield (Court of King's Bench), 1772
• Notes on the State of Virginia, Selected Letters, and The Jefferson Bible by Thomas Jefferson, 1785-1820
• The Task by William Cowper, 1785

Passages

From the texts

• Since then some men are slaves by nature, and others are freemen, it is clear that where slavery is advantageous to any one, then it is just to make him a slave.

  — Aristotle, Politics

Verified quotations

• Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves

  — John Milton, The Shorter Poems and Samson Agonistes

• There is MASTER-MORALITY and SLAVE-MORALITY

  — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

• The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

  — Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

• just as if knowledge were a slave, and might be dragged about anyhow

  — Plato, Protagoras

• Slaves were bribed against their masters, freedmen against their patrons, and, if a man had no enemies, he was ruined by his friends.

  — Tacitus, The Histories

• Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they

  — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

Passages are verified quotations from the library that use one of these words: slavery, slave, slaves, bondage. Sentences under “From the texts” are copied word for word from the full texts in this library. Read each in its context on the work's page.