On the record
I call upon any gentleman to name any one power of this government which cannot be exercised, which must necessarily cease, if slavery should cease to be, in this District of Columbia?
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gutenberg.orgHorace Mann: “I call upon any gentleman to name any one power of this government which cannot be exercised, which must necessarily…”
Editor's note · Context
Mann challenges others to identify any governmental power that relies on the existence of slavery.
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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.
Let me read to you the disparaging and contemptuous remark of the address on that great palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury.
Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!
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.
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