I hold that that is a false logic which talks about good slaveholders.... It is folly for us to talk about the slaveholders being kind. Cruelty is part and parcel of the system. If slavery is right at all, then all its terrors and horrors,—the whip, the manacle, the thumbscrew, the paddle, the stake, the gibbet—are right also; if it is not right, then all these are wrong.

Speech on the death of John Brown. The Liberator (December 9, 1859)