Horace Mann: “Why can we not combine for the sacred cause of freedom, as they combine for slavery?”

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

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.

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

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.