I can never acknowledge the right of slavery. I will bow down to no deity however worshipped by professing Christians — however dignified by the name of the Goddess of Liberty, whose footstool is the crushed necks of the groaning millions, and who rejoices in the resoundings of the tyrant's lash, and the cries of his tortured victims.

Letter (4 May 1838), quoted in Shapers of the Great Debate on the Civil War : A Biographical Dictionary (2005) by Dan Monroe and Bruce Tap, p. 255