It exhibits itself in the statute books of the slave states, prohibiting the education of slaves, making it highly penal to teach them so much as the alphabet; dispersing and punishing all meetings where they come together in quest of knowledge.
Mann highlights the laws in slave states that actively prevent the education of enslaved individuals, emphasizing the importance of knowledge.
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Let me read to you the disparaging and contemptuous remark of the address on that great palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury.
A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.
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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