Horace Mann

It is undertaking to settle by mountains and rivers, and not by the Ten Commandments, a great question of human duty.

He is great, but truth is greater than us all.

Let this Light of the Age be set upon a hill, that all nations may behold it.

If it is honorable to produce corn and cotton, it is honorable to buy and sell them,--and if it is honorable to hold beings created in God’s image in slavery, it is honorable to stand between the producer and consumer, and to make…

They are such compromises as the wolf offers to the lamb, or the vulture to the dove.

Should this plan prevail, the perpetuity of slavery in the District will be defended by more unassailable and impregnable barriers than any other institution in Christendom.

Or, rather, they will never suffer institutions to exist which tolerate such unrighteousness.

But California is free already; free by her own act; free without any concession of theirs, and without any grace but the grace of God.

There stands the record, to survive through all time and to be read of all men.

Would to God we could do as much for the cause of freedom.

Our first disaster was the election of a most adroit, talented, and zealous pro-slavery speaker.

It was with a joy such as no words can ever express, that I saw the territories rescued from the clutch of slavery by the expiration of the Thirtieth Congress.

Through that memorable night the friends of freedom wrestled like Jacob with the angel of God, and though the session did not close until the sun of a Sabbath morning shone full into the windows of the capitol, yet a holier work never was…

The course of the pro-slavery leaders, on that occasion, resembled that of a madman who should seize a torch and stand over the magazine of a ship, and proclaim that he would send men and vessel to destruction, unless they would steer for…

If long continued, all judges would resign, and courts be broken up; and when justice should cease to be administered, violence, robbery, and every form of crime would run riot through the land.

The appropriation bill is one on which the working, and even the continuance of the government, depend.

Webster had spoken more eloquent words for liberty than any other living man, and this distinguished neglect was doubtless intended to teach him the lesson, that the path to presidential honors did not lie through an advocacy of the rights…

The common notion is, that a man shows his love for a cause by the amount of sacrifice he will make for it; and as consistency, honor, and truth, are the most precious elements in character, he showed his devotion to the south by…

This avowal of General Cass was rendered more signal and valuable to the south, because, for the greater part of his political life, he had taken oaths, held offices, and administered laws, in undeniable contradiction to the declaration…

Hence, General Cass stepped promptly forward, and declared, in his Nicholson letter, that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories.

No northern Democrat, opposed to slavery extension, could expect the support of the southern democracy.

They promised themselves that they could draw over leading northern men to their support, by offering them the Tantalus cup of presidential honors; and then, by the force of party cohesion and discipline, insure the support of the vast…

But the great political leaders of the south expected to make up both for their numerical weakness and for the injustice of their cause, by connecting the question of slavery extension with that of future presidential elections and with…

Could that question have been decided on its merits, or could the institutions to be planted upon the territory we might acquire have been determined by the unbiased suffrages of the American people, no war would have been declared, and no…

Hence the war with Mexico, commenced and prosecuted to add slave territory and slave states to the southern section.