Every man, therefore, in any one of the free states of this Union, has a right to stand upon this legal presumption, and to claim all the privileges and immunities that grow out of it until his presumed freedom is wrested from him by legal proof.
Horace Mann: “Every man, therefore, in any one of the free states of this Union, has a right to stand upon this legal presumption, and…”
Editor's note · Context
Mann emphasizes the legal rights of individuals in free states to claim their freedom until proven otherwise.
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Better be debarred from the privilege of voting at all, than to be mocked with the form, while cheated of the substance.
Let me read to you the disparaging and contemptuous remark of the address on that great palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury.
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.
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.





