Thus considered, what a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! Every [111/112] atom, impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as with the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man's changeful will.

The momentary waves raised by the passing breeze, apparently born but to die on the spot which saw their birth, leave behind them an endless progeny, which, reviving with diminished energy in other seas, visiting a thousand shores, reflected from each and perhaps again partially concentrated, will pursue their ceaseless course till ocean be itself annihilated.

One danger in labeling Indigenous history as genocide is that it risks reinscribing pernicious stereotypes of Native Americans as victims who no longer exist. In considering disastrous policies like Indian removal, then, we must not overlook that Native people survived the trails of tears and worked to rebuild their communities afterward.

he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me. that ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benvolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. inventions then cannot in nature be a subject of property. society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility. but this may, or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body

These lectures center on the rights of property-holding white men and their relationship to slavery and the state. Thus, Law School teachings provided the legal justifications for slavery—one important tool in solidifying a slave society—to students whose whole University experience nonetheless supported white supremacy and slavery. 

“During the eighty years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery was indispensable to the economic development of the United States”

impossibility of understanding the nation’s spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center

“identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy,” “the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism” (University of Pennsylvania Press web site).

The essential point is that the South was the wealthiest region in the nation when slave values are included, but the poorest when they are not.

the love of justice &amp; the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a mortal<a class="ptr" id="TJ512303_6-ptr" href="#TJ512303_6" title="jump to note 1">1</a> reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain, and should have produced not a single effort, nay I fear not much serious willingness to relieve them &amp; ourselves from our present condition of moral and political reprobation.

. I had always hoped that the younger generation, recieving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast, and had become as it were the vital spirit of every American, that the generous temperament of youth, analogous to the motion of their blood, and above the suggestions of avarice, would have sympathised with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own <a id="TSJN-03-07-02-pb-0604"></a>share of it. but my intercourse with them, since my return, has not been sufficient to ascertain that they had made towards this point the progress I had hoped.