A gentleman once asked me in the South, what I thought, on the whole, of South Carolina. I told him: I am sorry to say that you are a century, at least, behind in the means of civilization. He wanted to know why I thought so. I said: The only civilization you have exists among your slaves: for if industry and the mechanical arts are the great criterion of civilization (and I believe they are), then certainly the slaves are the only civilized ones among you, because they do all the work.

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About Ernestine Rose

Ernestine Rose was a 19th-century American social activist. Ernestine Louise Rose was a suffragist, abolitionist, and freethinker who has been called the “first Jewish feminist.” Her career spanned from the 1830s to the 1870s, making her a contemporary to the more famous suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Read more on Wikipedia →

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