Sublime

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

“No speech in the English language, perhaps no speech in modern times, had ever been as widely diffused and widely read as Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne,” an historian of the period was to write. That speech “raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.” It made the Union, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wo

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy wo

I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. It is for no particular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Moreover, Harriet Stowe had made a black man her hero, and she took his race seriously, and no American writer had done that before. The fundamental fault, she fervently held, was with the system. Every white American was guilty, the Northerner no less than the slaveholder, especially the churchgoing kind, her kind.

It is better to die fighting for freedom than to rot away in one’s chains, the argument runs. Before I’d be a slave I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my God And be free!