Horace Mann

I never said any thing to give countenance or color to such a declaration.

Badger represents me as saying that I would “prefer a disunion of these states,” and all the other evils in his long and labored catalogue, “rather than the extension of slavery one foot;” “yes,” he repeats with emphasis, “one foot.” Now…

Beyond our present limits “no more slave territories and no more slave states,” was the exact ground I took.

He is like the man who should declare that the Scriptures say “there is no God,” when it is the fool, and not the Bible, that makes the declaration.

It is not, however, the existence of slavery, but its extension, we now intend to avert.

What shall be thought of a system, AND OF EXTENDING A SYSTEM, which so perverts the hearts of men, otherwise clear-headed, high-minded, and generous!

These are not the customs of a lawless banditti, of outcasts or renegades, but solemn enactments of state legislatures, devised by talent and eminence, enforced and preserved by the oligarchical few, by the virtual nobility and flower of…

The slave’s time is too valuable to be lost in a prison, but the white man’s is not; the white man’s skin is too sacred to be flayed or branded, but the slave’s is not.

In South Carolina, slaves have never been admitted to the benefit of clergy for offences at common law; and thus a slave is punished capitally for maiming or grievously beating a white man.

On the contrary, slaves are punished capitally for offences that are not so punished when committed by white men.

What I have said, I have said as to a brother sleeping on the brink of a precipice, where one motion of his troubled sleeping, or of his bewildered awaking, might plunge him into remediless ruin.

If I have uttered severe truths, I have not sought for severe language in which to clothe them.

He that defends slavery by war, wars against the eternal laws of God, and rushes upon the thick bosses of Jehovah’s buckler.

Can you muster armies in secret, and march them in secret, so that the slave shall not know that they are mustered and marched to perpetuate his bondage, and to extend the bondage of his race?

Civil war between the north and the south,--any thing that brings the quickening idea of freedom home to the mind of the slave; that supplies him with facilities of escape, or immunities for revenge,--will unleash the bloodhounds of…

In its deepest tranquillity, it is but a truce.

The state of slavery is always a state of war.

Read the history of those slaves who have escaped from bondage; mark their endurance and their contrivance, and let incredulity cease forever.

Not Macbeth, but the angel of retribution, will “murder sleep.” The mother will clasp her infant to her breast, and, while she clasps it, die a double death.

Let this wildfire of a servile insurrection break out in but one place in a state; nay, in but ten places, or in five places in all the fifteen states; and then, in all their length and breadth, there will be no more quiet sleep.

It may be a text of Scripture, it may be the contents of a wine vault; but the result will be the same,--havoc wherever there is wealth, murder wherever there is life, violation wherever there is chastity.

Has it any barriers to keep the spirit of liberty, which has electrified the Old World, from crossing its own borders, and quickening its bondmen into mutinous life?--not all of them, but one in ten thousand, one in a hundred thousand of…

It is literal truth that the south fosters within its homes three millions of latent rebellions.

Whether dormant or wakeful, it only awaits an opportunity to become the mastering impulse of the soul.

The slave shares it with his master, and it has descended into his bosom from the same high source.