Horace Mann: “The previous question, which was originally devised to curb the abuse of too much debate, was perverted to stop all…”

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.

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.

These are but specimens of what the Fugitive Slave law has already done, before the public mind has become familiarized with its brutalities, and while there is yet some sensibility to the claims of justice and mercy left among us.