Horace Mann: “The first position I take is this: That slavery has no legal existence any where, unless by force of positive law.”

I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.

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.

Men of Massachusetts! moral and religious men! lovers of freedom and of your country, were you prepared for this?

Better be debarred from the privilege of voting at all, than to be mocked with the form, while cheated of the substance.