Owen Lovejoy Quotes

American politician (1811-1864)

Owen Lovejoy (6 January 1811 – 25 March 1864) was an American politician and religious minister during the 19th century. Originally from Maine, he represented the U.S. state of Illinois in the United States House of Representatives. A member of the U.S. Republican Party that was opposed to slavery, Lovejoy was a friend of Abraham Lincoln and assisted runaway slaves in escaping to freedom.

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Now, if there is anyone dissatisfied with the fact, that there is a whole race of human beings, with the rights of human beings, created with a skin not colored like our own, let him go mouth the heavens, and mutter his blasphemies in the ear of the God that made us all. Tell him that he had no business to make human beings with a black skin. I repeat, I feel no responsibility for this fact. But, inasmuch as it has pleased God to make them human beings, I am bound to regard them as such. Instead of chattering your gibberish in my ear bout negro equality, go look the son of God in the face and reproach him for favoring negro equality because he poured out his blood for the most abject and despised of the human family. Go settle this matter with the God who created and the Christ who redeemed.

Sir, than robbery, than piracy, than polygamy, slaveholding is worse. More criminal, more injurious to man, and consequently more offensive to God. Slaveholding has been justly designated as the sum of all villainy. Put every crime perpetuated among men into a moral crucible, and dissolve and combine them all, and the resultant amalgam is slaveholding. It has the violence of robbery.

The Republican Party, of which I am a member, stands pledged since 1856 to the extermination, so far as the federal government has the power, the twin relics of barbarism, slavery, and polygamy. They have this power in the territories of the United States.

In truth, I swore to support the Constitution because I believe in it. I do not believe in their construction of it. It is as well known as any historical fact can be known, that the framers of the Constitution so worded it as that it never should recognize the idea of slave property. From the beginning to the ending of it.

I poured on a rainstorm of fire and brimstone as hot as I could, and you know something of what that is. I believe that I never said anything more savage in the pulpit or on the stump.

If the Bible sanctions slavery at all, it is the enslavement of white men. No one pretends that the servants spoken of in the Bible were blacks. The Roman slave was not a black man, the Hebrew slave was not a black man. The question is, whether the laboring man, white or black, may rightfully be enslaved.