As human beings, could not the desire of escape from their master’s possession have originated with themselves?--prompted by the inward and instinctive longings for liberty, which spring perennial in the human breast.
Mann reflects on the natural human longing for freedom, suggesting that enslaved individuals could have been driven by their innate desires to escape.
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The liberty of voting includes all other liberties.
A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.
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.
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.
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