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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Whoever intercepts knowledge, therefore, on its passage to a human soul; whoever strikes down the hand that is outstretched to grasp it, is guilty of one of the most heinous of offences.
What rights are more sacred or more dear to us than the conjugal and the parental?
Even cold, barren New England, though more than twice as thickly peopled, grew in population at a faster rate than these old slave states.
Yet, by denying education to the slave, you destroy not merely the right, but the power, of personal examination in regard to all that most nearly concerns the soul’s interests.
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