Webster says there are independent courts at the south, “always open and ready to receive and decide upon petitions or applications for freedom.” Suppose this to be true; how is a man or a woman, whose master knows that he or she is free, to get to the courts?
Mann questions the practicality of accessing justice for freed individuals in the South, as suggested by Webster.
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Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!
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 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.
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.
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