Horace Mann: “Did the law ever contemplate so cruel and revengeful a proceeding?”

My instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, may all mislead; but from the first time, now years ago, when I heard this subject broached, my instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, have all been in its favor.

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.

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.

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.