On the record
Because it is a law which, if executed in the free states, divests them of the character of free states, and makes them voluntary participators in the guilt of slaveholding.
Source
gutenberg.orgEditor's note · Context
Mann argues that the enforcement of the law would compromise the identity of free states and implicate them in slavery.
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What rights are more sacred or more dear to us than the conjugal and the parental?
Cast it off, West Virginians, whilst yet you have the power; for if you let it descend unbroken to your children, it will have grown to a mountain of misery upon their heads.
So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.
No man of common sense, who has observed this result, can doubt for a moment that the system of free labor promotes the growth and prosperity of states in a much higher degree than the system of slave labor.
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