Ned Sublette Quotes
A second line is in effect a civil rights demonstration. Literally, demonstrating the civil right of the community to assemble in the street for peaceful purposes. Or, more simply, demonstrating the civil right of the community to exist.

-Ned Sublette
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It is in no small part to Henry’s resistance that the Constitution owes the Second Amendment in particular—the one that promises “the right to keep and bear arms” in order to have “a wellregulated militia”—and it too was, in part, about slavery, because in the South, the . . . Read more

-Ned Sublette
That the War of Independence resulted in the strengthening, not the termination, of slavery was not an unexpected outcome for Southerners: protecting slavery had been the point of the war for them. It was the principal Southern political goal at every moment until slavery was destroyed.

-Ned Sublette
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Twenty-two-year-old Ona Judge, who was Martha Washington’s personal servant, escaped from the President and First Lady of the United States in Philadelphia in 1796 after learning she was to be given away as a wedding gift. She married a free black man in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a . . . Read more

-Ned Sublette
Much like a house mortgaged to a bank today, mortgaged slaves were security for those who put up the money for the mortgage, to whom the slaves were “conveyed.” A mortgage financier might be a merchant, a church with an investment portfolio, a college, a bank, or, commonly, a weal . . . Read more

-Ned Sublette
Nor did enslaved women have legal protection against sexual abuse from enslaved men. In the 1859 case of George v. the State of Mississippi, in which an enslaved man was accused of raping an enslaved female child, the Mississippi supreme court noted that “a slave can only commit rap . . . Read more

-Ned Sublette
In particular, three slaveowning politicians loom large in our narrative as principal enablers of the territorial expansion of slavery and, consequently, of the slave-breeding industry: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk—a Virginian and two Tennesseans. All three we . . . Read more

-Ned Sublette
To own a slave was to have a license for libertine behavior, because sexual violation was intrinsic to slavery. The slaveowner had the full legal right to do with his property as he saw fit,

-Ned Sublette
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