These, gentlemen, are the facts, and, as I believe, all the important facts pertaining to this case; and on these facts we claim that you must acquit the prisoner of the offence of larceny.

Fry to have had no “taste” for laying open the abominations of the prison-house, and for giving relief to the prisoner.

Not a single ameliorating law has been passed.

All the crime of their kidnapping; all the horrors of the middle passage; all their sufferings for two centuries, or six generations; and all the calamities that are yet to grow out of their condition,--all these crimes and agonies are…

But not one thing is done to bring out the qualities of manhood that lie buried in a slave.

Look through the southern statute books, and see what Draconian penalties are inflicted for teaching a slave to read,--see how he is lashed for attending a meeting to hear the Word of God.

If any light penetrates to his soul, it is because human art cannot weave a cloud dense and dark enough to be wholly impervious to it.

If a master wishes to repose personal confidence in his slave, he desires to have him honest and faithful to truth.

This is an honor that no rival can ever snatch from her brow.

I cannot deny,--would to God that I could,--that we still have vices and vicious men amongst us.

This is the lowest standard of duty that any one who aspires to be a Christian or a gentleman can set up for his guidance.

However atrocious the wrongs they may suffer in their own person and character, or in the person and character of wife or children, they cannot appeal to the courts to avenge or redress them.

Are they forever to wear a “wolf’s head,” which every white man may cut off when he pleases?

Such, sir, are the sights that molest us when we come here from the north,--that molest us in the hotels, that molest us in the streets, that molest us in the courts, that molest us every where.

If a man destroys my power of hearing, it is precisely the same to me as though, leaving my faculty of hearing untouched, he had annihilated all the melodies and harmonies of the universe.

If a man obliterates my power of vision, it is precisely the same to me as though he had blotted out the light of the sun, and flung a pall of darkness over all the beauties of the earth and the glories of the firmament.

They would lose nothing by surrendering it; we suffer every thing by its continuance.

In regard to this whole matter of slavery, the constitution touches the subject with an averted face.

No PERSON shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Now, what does this word “person” mean?

Or who, under the constitution, is such a “person” as cannot be deprived of life, liberty, or property, by virtue of an act of Congress, without due process of law?

There has been no “due” process of law to reduce him to this miserable condition; there has been no process of law at all.

But now, as slavery has existed practically in this District for half a century, it is proper to pass a law abolishing it.

Do our laws and our institutions seek to blot out and abolish the image of God in the human soul?

The conclusion, then, is irresistible, that when you come to the boundary line between a slave state and a free state, you come to the boundary line of slavery itself.

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