Life & Wisdom Quote by John Sergeant Wise

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.