On the record
What he has, he has ex gratia, by the good will of those who own him, body and soul, and who are graciously pleased to forego some of their legal rights from generosity in themselves, and not from justice to him.
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gutenberg.orgHorace Mann: “What he has, he has ex gratia, by the good will of those who own him, body and soul, and who are graciously pleased to…”
Editor's note · Context
Mann argues that any rights a slave has are granted by their owners, not inherent or just.
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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.
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.
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.
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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