On the record
Perhaps, foreseeing her fate, she practised what, under such circumstances, we might call the virtue of suicide.
Source
gutenberg.orgHorace Mann: “Perhaps, foreseeing her fate, she practised what, under such circumstances, we might call the virtue of suicide.”
Editor's note · Context
Mann suggests that the enslaved woman may have chosen death over the horrors awaiting her, framing it as a tragic act of agency.
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My instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, may all mislead; but from the first time, now years ago, when I heard this subject broached, my instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, have all been in its favor.
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 kidnapper, Alberti, now lies in a Pennsylvania prison for carrying away a mother and her child; but the mother and the child are now groaning under the lash of a southern taskmaster.
A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.
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