If the trial of the issue, “fugitive slave or not,” be, “in the strictest sense,” “within the express delegation of judicial power given” by the constitution, then this ministerial commissioner cannot exercise it, and Congress cannot empower him to exercise it.
Mann argues that a ministerial commissioner cannot exercise judicial power over fugitive slaves as defined by the Constitution.
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Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!
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.
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