Life & Wisdom Quote by John Sergeant Wise

There is a quiet, dangerous sleight of hand in Wise's phrasing: he turns slavery from an active crime into a matter of public "looking upon". The sentence is built to naturalize moral drift. By anchoring the claim in "those days", Wise doesn’t just date the attitude; he quarantines responsibility, suggesting that conscience is a fashion that changes with the season. The passive construction - slavery "was not looked upon" - keeps perpetrators offstage and relocates the action to the audience’s gaze, as if the institution’s brutality depended on someone’s review of it.

The choice of "even in Quaker Philadelphia" does extra work. Quakers are shorthand for early American anti-slavery sentiment, and Philadelphia for a civic mythology of liberty. Wise invokes that reputation to underline how ordinary slavery supposedly was, but also to preempt easy moral superiority: if even the best people didn’t shudder, the reader is nudged toward indulgence rather than judgment.

"Shudder and abhorrence" is tellingly modern and bodily, a visceral reaction Wise credits to the present. That contrast flatters the contemporary reader as ethically advanced while quietly making condemnation feel anachronistic, almost unfair. In the late 19th-century world Wise inhabited - post-Civil War, amid Lost Cause nostalgia and reconciliation politics - this kind of sentence functions as cultural anesthesia. It invites us to treat slavery as a misalignment of sensibilities, not a system of violence maintained by law, profit, and terror.