White Slavery in the Barbary States — Charles Sumner

Description

A landmark lecture by Charles Sumner — the great American abolitionist senator — delivered in 1847, examining the history of white Christian captives enslaved by the Barbary pirates of North Africa. Sumner uses this history to powerfully argue against all forms of slavery, drawing parallels that scandalized his contemporaries. An important and forgotten document in the history of abolitionism and the fight against slavery in all its forms.

Excerpt

History has been sometimes called a gallery, where, in living forms, are preserved the scenes, the incidents, and the characters of the past. It may also be called the world's great charnel house, where are gathered coffins, dead men's bones, and all the uncleanness of the years that have fled. As we walk among its pictures, radiant with the inspiration of virtue and of freedom, we confess a new impulse to beneficent exertion. As we grope amidst the unsightly shapes that have been left without an epitaph, we may at least derive a fresh aversion to all their living representatives.