I have seen members of this House to whom I have been disposed to give a friendly caution to keep their “free papers” about their persons, lest suddenly, on the presumption from color, they should be seized and sold for runaway slaves.
Mann warns of the dangers faced by free individuals of color in a society that may not recognize their freedom.
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A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.
Let me read to you the disparaging and contemptuous remark of the address on that great palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury.
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.
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