Happiness Quote by Ezra Cornell

“The Soul of man is made an article of merchandize” is a businessman’s condemnation that uses the language of the market to indict the market. Cornell doesn’t argue slavery is merely cruel; he argues it is an economic logic so totalizing it converts the one thing presumed unpriceable - a person’s inner life - into inventory. The choice of “merchandize” is doing the heavy lifting: it suggests ledgers, auctions, contracts, and routine. Evil as bureaucracy, not just violence.

The question that follows - “and can such a land be happy?” - works like a courtroom trap. It’s rhetorical, but it’s also tactical: it reframes abolition from a niche moral plea into a national self-assessment. Happiness becomes a civic metric, not a private feeling. Cornell implies a country can’t buy prosperity on the backs of enslaved people and still claim the emotional legitimacy of a “happy” republic. “No!” lands as a verdict, not an opinion.

“Scard by the blighting curse of Slavery” folds spiritual language into political critique. “Scard” (scarred) suggests permanence: slavery isn’t a removable stain, it’s a wound that reshapes the body politic. “Blighting” evokes agriculture and inheritance - something that ruins future harvests. For a 19th-century entrepreneur and institution-builder, this is the subtext: slavery isn’t just wrong; it distorts labor, corrodes social trust, and taints the very success a nation wants to celebrate. The intent is persuasion across lines of faith and finance: if you care about the soul, the economy, or the country’s future, you can’t compartmentalize slavery.