On the record
Will you make the act of escape a capital offence in a slave, and destroy the victim you cannot restrain?
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gutenberg.orgHorace Mann: “Will you make the act of escape a capital offence in a slave, and destroy the victim you cannot restrain?”
Editor's note · Context
Mann questions the morality of punishing a slave for attempting to escape, highlighting the inhumanity of slavery.
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Men of Massachusetts! moral and religious men! lovers of freedom and of your country, were you prepared for this?
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.
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.
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.
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