The Potomac and the Chesapeake are the American Niger and Bight of Benin; while this District is the great government barracoon, whence coffles are driven across the country to Alabama or Texas, as slave ships once bore their dreadful cargoes of agony and woe across the Atlantic.
Mann uses vivid imagery to describe the slave trade routes in America, likening them to historical slave ships.
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The kidnapper, Alberti, now lies in a Pennsylvania prison for carrying away a mother and her child; but the mother and the child are now groaning under the lash of a southern taskmaster.
My instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, may all mislead; but from the first time, now years ago, when I heard this subject broached, my instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, have all been in its favor.
These are but specimens of what the Fugitive Slave law has already done, before the public mind has become familiarized with its brutalities, and while there is yet some sensibility to the claims of justice and mercy left among us.
I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.
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