The very shortest time which the court, in its discretion, could imprison, after a conviction on all these indictments, would be two hundred and eighty-seven years!

But a penalty not inflicted by the statute, but superadded by this unwarrantable proceeding of the government, is the defence of seventy-four successive cases, under which the wealthiest, the strongest, and the most innocent man must break…

The government is not a being of wrath, of ferocity, of vindictiveness; and the exhibition of such passions is as unsuitable to the representative of the government as to the government itself.

It should be a place consecrated to the inquiry, “What is truth?” and to the application of its conclusions to the conduct of men.

It should be a verdict, therefore, which you can look upon, at the close of life, with conscientious satisfaction.

It must be one which your children can look at with a filial and honorable regard for their fathers’ uprightness.

In a case which has excited so much attention, both here and throughout the country, you, too, must expect to be put on trial; your verdict will go into the great record of history, to be passed upon by your country and by posterity.

The storm of popular disaffection soon cleared away, and now twelve purer and fairer names are not inscribed on the roll of fame than the names of those twelve jurymen, who dared to brave public opinion, and to perform an act of arduous…

Noble and illustrious bravery of the soul, which, when the yelling fiends of popular passion and prejudice beset the ascending pathway of virtue, can look to conscience, to posterity, and to God, and defy them all!

Follow their example, gentlemen, and, whatever fierce sounds of public condemnation may be now rung in your ears, you will have the same glorious reward, and your children, and all the good men of your country, will honor your memories.

This would be to suppose that you sit there to administer the worst kind of Lynch law,--a kind that has all its injustice, while screening itself from the odium of its violence.

The object of civil society is to protect rights and to redress wrongs.

Civil society takes away something from a man’s rights, but it adds immensely to his powers; it makes him stronger than any individual oppressor, and, on the whole, it protects its members far better than they could protect themselves.

But civil society, like every thing human, is imperfect.

It has done well, though it has not done all.

But suppose this very civil society, wielding as it does the combined and terrible strength of the whole community, should turn its collected force against an innocent man, and crush him, then in what an utter and hopeless ruin is he…

How much better for him had its powerful machinery never existed, than that he should be ground to powder beneath its wheels!

As, therefore, if the geographical metes and bounds of the State of Maryland were shown to you, you could not say, upon your oaths, that it was a description of the State of Pennsylvania; so, if the offence of “transporting” be proved to…

All are made for the measurement of time, as all these laws were made for the protection of slave property.

But could you, therefore, on your oaths, convict a man of stealing a chronometer, when he had only taken a clock or a watch?

No, you could find him guilty only of the thing proved to have been done.

Then it would be necessary, in an indictment, to set out the kind of book stolen, and no man could be lawfully punished for the weightier offence who had only committed the lighter.

Is it not a thousand times more probable that it was done by some citizen in the District, or by some colored acquaintance or friend of theirs, enjoying the means of constant communication with them, than that it was done by an entire…

Can aught be conceived more absurd or preposterous than that the prisoner should go round the streets of Washington, picking up a slave here and there, to complete his cargo, as the driver of a stage-coach goes round picking up passengers?

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.