Why Abolitionists Defended Free Speech

Today the immorality of chattel slavery is painfully obvious, but that has not always been the case. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a black man like Dred Scott was "reduced to slavery for his benefit." In 1861, the vice president of the Confederacy similarly declared that it was a "great physical, philosophical, and moral truth" that "slavery subordination to the superior race" was black people's "natural and normal condition."