It allowed “persons” who were held to service or labor and who should escape into other states to be retaken, but it also secured the trial by jury to every “person” who should claim it on any question of life or liberty, and on all questions of property even down to the paltry sum of twenty dollars.
Mann highlights the legal complexities surrounding escaped slaves and their rights under the Constitution.
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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.
The liberty of voting includes all other liberties.
Better be debarred from the privilege of voting at all, than to be mocked with the form, while cheated of the substance.
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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