Horace Mann: “And is our love for the Union always to be converted, or rather perverted, into a pro-slavery motive of action?”

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

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.

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.

A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.