"This and many others only confirmed me in the opinion, planted when I saw the sale of Martha Ann, and growing steadily thereafter, that slavery was an accursed business, and that the sooner my people were relieved of it, the better"
About this Quote
Accursed is doing more work here than any statistic ever could. Wise isn’t offering a cool moral deduction; he’s staging a conversion narrative with a bruise at its center. The sentence pivots on a memory he names with legalistic clarity - “the sale of Martha Ann” - then lets that single, human-scale rupture metastasize into a settled political judgment. The intent is to claim credibility: this isn’t abolitionism borrowed from Northern pamphlets, but an opinion “planted” early and “growing steadily thereafter,” like conscience behaving like a fact of nature.
The subtext is even sharper because Wise is writing from inside the world that benefited from slavery. “My people” quietly marks tribal belonging - class, region, family, and the whole web of white Southern identity - while also trying to distance himself from the institution. He isn’t saying the enslaved should be “relieved”; he says his people should be “relieved of it,” a phrasing that frames slavery as a moral infection afflicting the enslavers, not merely a system crushing the enslaved. That rhetorical move both widens his audience and softens culpability: emancipation becomes a release valve for the masters’ soul as much as justice for the enslaved.
Context matters: Wise came of age in the Civil War generation and wrote later, when Lost Cause nostalgia competed with uncomfortable truths. This line pushes against sentimental amnesia by anchoring “slavery” to a specific sale, a named person, an event that refuses to stay abstract. It works because it smuggles indictment through memoir: one remembered transaction becomes a verdict on an entire economy of cruelty.
The subtext is even sharper because Wise is writing from inside the world that benefited from slavery. “My people” quietly marks tribal belonging - class, region, family, and the whole web of white Southern identity - while also trying to distance himself from the institution. He isn’t saying the enslaved should be “relieved”; he says his people should be “relieved of it,” a phrasing that frames slavery as a moral infection afflicting the enslavers, not merely a system crushing the enslaved. That rhetorical move both widens his audience and softens culpability: emancipation becomes a release valve for the masters’ soul as much as justice for the enslaved.
Context matters: Wise came of age in the Civil War generation and wrote later, when Lost Cause nostalgia competed with uncomfortable truths. This line pushes against sentimental amnesia by anchoring “slavery” to a specific sale, a named person, an event that refuses to stay abstract. It works because it smuggles indictment through memoir: one remembered transaction becomes a verdict on an entire economy of cruelty.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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