Quotes & Sayings About Freedmen

The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former ... [T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. — Karl Marx

Whenever I am present, we are vigilant to give the same allotments to all who approach us." "But when you are absent?" Stephen turned and stared out the storeroom's open doorway. "The widows and orphans from the freedmen's group are perhaps the most vulnerable among us. Many come from outlying provinces. They include many former slaves, with no funds or income or place to stay. We help care for all their needs. Especially those without gardens, fields, or vineyards of their own." "And families to help," Abigail said softly. He looked at her. "If everyone had your giving heart and caring spirit, this situation would vanish. — Janette Oke

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage. — Samuel Eliot Morison

To be rich or well-born was a crime: men were prosecuted for holding or for refusing office: merit of any kind meant certain ruin. Nor were the Informers more hated for their crimes than for their prizes: some carried off a priesthood or the consulship as their spoil, others won offices and influence in the imperial household: the hatred and fear they inspired worked universal havoc. Slaves were bribed against their masters, freedmen against their patrons, and, if a man had no enemies, he was ruined by his friends. — Tacitus

For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote. — W.E.B. Du Bois

This land carries people from different countries, different cultures, even different tongues, who even warred amongst themselves, but they are united over on only one cause; hate. The people of the Southern United States united in their hate against the free population of their previous slaves. — Max Connelly

No African has ever voluntarily emigrated to the shores of the New World; whence it must be inferred, that all the blacks who are now to be found in that hemisphere are either slaves or freedmen. — Alexis De Tocqueville

What white Southerners called "redemption" and others deemed simply the return to power of the Democrats, who sufficiently intimidated, cheated and otherwise discouraged Republicans, including most of the freedmen, that they counted for little in Southern politics. With any Democratic presidential nominee guaranteed the South, any Republican had to perform overwhelmingly in the North. — H.W. Brands

Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Virtue is shut out from no one; she is open to all, accepts all, invites all, gentlemen, freedmen, slaves, kings, and exiles; she selects neither house nor fortune; she is satisfied with a human being without adjuncts. — Seneca The Younger

It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters - a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Ambition is the intellectual equivalent of body odour. — Jerry Toner