In a December 1866 speech Bayley Wyat, a freedman, protests the closing the contraband camps in Yorktown. The camps were established during the American Civil War (1861–1865) as places of refuge for men and women who escaped from slavery to Union territory. Wyat argues that African Americans have a rightful claim to the land based on their service to the Union Army and their contribution as enslaved laborers to building the American economy.
Waitman Willey, a delegate to the Secession Convention from Monongalia County (now part of West Virginia), argues for equal taxation of all property in Virginia.
The following speech, written by Francis Nicholson and the Reverend James Blair to lobby the House of Burgesses and delivered by a student at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, on May 1, 1699, extols the benefits of moving the colonial capital from Jamestown to Middle Plantation.
In his so-called Cornerstone Speech, delivered on March 21, 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, the Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens described the new Confederate constitution. Slavery, he said, and “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” would be its cornerstone. The speech was first reported in the Savannah Republican newspaper, with this version appearing in a collection of Stephens’s papers, edited by Henry Cleveland and published in 1866.
On January 16, 1832, the fifth day of what is now known as the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832, William B. Preston, of Montgomery County, argues that enslaved men and women were born with the rights of human beings, and were only made slaves by statutes that could be repealed.
The following eulogy, spoken by William Munford at the funeral of George Wythe on June 9, 1806, was reprinted in the Richmond Enquirer on June 13 and 17, 1806. Wythe died on June 8 after allegedly being poisoned by his grandnephew, George Wythe Sweeney.
In a speech of the House of Delegates on January 11, 1832, Samuel McDowell Moore, of Rockbridge County, argues that slavery in Virginia inhibits economic growth and safety against foreign aggressors. His comments were part of the Virginia Slavery Debates taking place in the wake of Nat Turner’s Rebellion.
In what came to be known as the Lyceum Address, delivered at the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, on January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln, then a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, bemoans what he calls the "mobocratic spirit" running rampant in the United States. In particular, he criticizes the lynching of gamblers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and a free black man in Saint Louis. The date for the speech given in this edition of Lincoln’s writings is off by one year.
In his First Inaugural Address, dated March 4, 1801, President Thomas Jefferson adopts a conciliatory tone, trying to heal the divisions of the Election of 1800. He outlines what he deems to be the government’s essential principles, which will serve as the foundation for his tenure.
On January 12, 1832, the second day of what is now known as the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832, James H. Gholson, of Brunswick County, gave an appeal to the rights of property owners as delineated in the U.S. Constitution. Gholson cites the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the government from taking private property for public use without just compensation.
