Leadership Quote by Robert Dale Owen

“We can constitutionally extirpate slavery at this time” is a sentence doing double duty: moral urgency smuggled through legalese. Robert Dale Owen isn’t arguing that slavery is evil - his audience already knows the indictment. He’s arguing something more tactical and, in the 1860s, more explosive: that the Constitution, so often used as slavery’s shield, can be turned into the instrument of its removal. The word “constitutionally” is the key pressure point. It anticipates the central conservative objection to abolition: that emancipation is not just radical but unlawful, a rupture of the founding compact. Owen’s claim tries to collapse that distinction, insisting the law has opened a door wide enough to end slavery without tearing down the republic.

“Extirpate” is equally loaded. It’s not “limit,” “contain,” or even “abolish” - it’s surgical, almost botanical, suggesting slavery is an invasive growth that must be cut out by the root. That language signals impatience with half-measures like gradual emancipation or compensated schemes. It also frames slavery as an existential threat to the nation’s body, not merely a regional policy dispute.

The phrase “at this time” anchors the argument in wartime contingency. During the Civil War, old constitutional certainties were suddenly pliable: secession, military necessity, federal power, and the moral politics of union all collided. Owen’s intent is to seize that moment before it closes, to tell lawmakers that history has created a narrow legal window - and that failing to act would be a choice, not an inevitability.