Horace Mann: “They can light the torch of civil war, or they can quench it.”

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.

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

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.

Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!