The iniquity of the law is, that it enables a perjured or fictitious slave owner, on proofs most easily fabricated, to seize any individual in a free state, and to prejudge him to be a slave, by the very form of trial which this law authorizes.
Mann condemns a law that allows false claims of slavery to be made easily, endangering free individuals.
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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.
Men of Massachusetts! moral and religious men! lovers of freedom and of your country, were you prepared for this?
Better be debarred from the privilege of voting at all, than to be mocked with the form, while cheated of the substance.
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