Horace Mann

Their bonds have been ten thousand times more powerful than their bayonets in consummating this disastrous compromise.

This surrendering to the threat of disunion, is like the foolish mother who gave her boy a sugar-plum to stop swearing.

There was never any thing more ridiculous than the threats of Texas, that she will take armed possession of the eastern side of the Rio Grande, if it be not surrendered to her.

But it is said we have registered these acts of pro-slavery legislation, at the dictation of the south, in order to save the Union.

I have done so, in the second place, because I was your representative, and believed myself to be acting in conformity with your wishes, with the wishes of the Whig party of Massachusetts, and of my constituents generally.

Because, in the first place, I felt myself a moral and accountable being; and, as such, I could not do otherwise.

Standing here, then, before you, my constituents, to give account of my stewardship, I have to say, that with voice and vote, by expostulation and by remonstrance, by all means in my power, I have, to the full extent of my ability…

But, fellow-citizens, slavery is already in the territories, whether prohibited by God and nature, or not!

And if slavery could only be kept out of the territories while they remained territories, it would, of course, be prohibited by the state itself, when the condition of territorial pupilage should be succeeded by that of state independence.

Slaveholders would not venture to carry slaves into a country, where, at any moment an act of Congress might emancipate them.

Should the northern members of the House prove true to their constituencies and their pledges, they would never allow the territories to be organized without the proviso; and the fear of such a prohibition would exclude slavery from the…

He intended honestly to carry out the will of Congress, and execute the laws of his country, regardless of slaveholding dictation.

Whatever I may have thought of him, and of the propriety of nominating him, it is but justice to say that I now believe that he was a true man, and an anti-slavery man.

Now, I ask, if this gift of a slave state is a trifle to be thrown in like the value of a small coin in the settlement of an account?

If not lost, nothing can save it but a vigor and an energy on the part of the north, such as they have not lately put forth.

I grieve to say that I fear the battle has been lost.

But if we once admit slavery into those immense regions, comprising all the unsettled residue of this continent, God will give us no new continent on which the error may be retrieved.

When God gives to the world a generation of children, and they are ruined through parental neglect, he gives another generation, that another trial may be made.

Our authority once exercised, the act would be irrevocable, and the doom of all that region would be fixed, as by a decree of Omnipotence.

We had the shaping of the destinies of half a continent intrusted to our keeping.

We had, as it were, a creative power put into our hands.

The most momentous consequences were suspended on the decision of this question.

If they would only do this, and not attempt to carry every thing by slave-begotten votes, and by adding new states to beget more slave votes, they would soon surpass us; for nature has done vastly more for them, in soil and climate and in…

They must build schoolhouses to develop the minds of their children, and churches to cultivate their morals.

They must, all of them, labor as we do, in one way or another, with the hand or with the head; or,--which is the only true way,--with both together.