Judge Story says, “When our more immediate ancestors removed to America, they brought this great privilege with them, as their birthright and inheritance, as a part of that admirable common law which had fenced round, and interposed barriers on every side, against the approaches of arbitrary power.
Mann quotes Judge Story to illustrate the historical significance of the jury trial as a birthright.
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A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.
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.
The man of independent circumstances has this liberty; and no man’s circumstances, not even the poorest and the humblest, should be so dependent as to take it away.
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