If it is honorable to produce corn and cotton, it is honorable to buy and sell them,--and if it is honorable to hold beings created in God’s image in slavery, it is honorable to stand between the producer and consumer, and to make merchandise of the bodies and the souls of men.
Mann argues that if it is considered honorable to produce and trade in agricultural goods, then it is equally honorable to acknowledge the moral implications of trading in human beings.
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It is only in the land of slaves that they are blotted out and annihilated.
Packed and stowed like merchandise between unventilated decks, so close that the tempest without could not ruffle the pestilential air within, the voyage was begun.
But the impious hand of man divorces these twin capacities, wherever it denies knowledge.
The institution of slavery is against natural right.
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