Horace Mann: “Yet if Congress can create or legalize slavery, it can establish the worst order of nobility that ever existed.”

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.

But such largesses to slavery as kings could not afford to give, and the robbery of an entire race of all its rights,--yes, and with authority, too, to make us help commit the robbery,--these are “factitious and imaginary” causes of…

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.