Horace Mann

But you have special laws; local and peculiar laws,--laws contrary to the great principles of the common law, by which you call men and women property.

Will not every man, even of the feeblest discernment, see the fallacy which is here covered up under the word “property?” What is meant by this deceptive term “property?” If you mean silver, or gold, or seeds, or grains, or sheep, or…

I think those who use this argument, like the old Roman augurs, must smile at each other askance, for the credulity or simplicity of those they beguile by it.

If the city of Boston debars him of this right of educating his son at the public charge, he can institute a suit against it and recover full damages.

In the Boston public schools, he can prepare his son to enter any college in this country, even though he is too poor to pay a cent for taxes, and never has paid a cent for taxes.

A citizen of Boston has a right to educate his children at school, at the public expense.

And now, practically, what right has the north, or what right is claimed by the north, which the south has not to an equal extent?

It was said by the last administration, that Mexico was to be dismembered, in order “to extend the area of freedom.” The most just retribution for that diabolical irony is, to carry out the declaration literally.

If the Bible has crossed the Atlantic to spread slavery over a continent where it was unknown before, then the Bible is a book of death, and not a book of life.

And now, this authority is cited, not to disprove a law of physical nature merely, but to deny a great law of the human soul,--a law of human consciousness,--a law of God, written upon the tablet of every man’s heart, authenticating and…

Torture the hallowed pages of the Bible, To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood, And, in oppression’s hateful service, libel Both man and God.

It is not to be “hallowed,” as a year of jubilee, but to be profaned as a year of captivity and mourning.

This is the fiftieth year of the century,--the very year of jubilee itself; and yet, instead of “returning every man unto his possession, and every man unto his family,” this is the chosen year for subjugating new realms to bondage.

If the Bible is your commission, why do you not follow the terms of the commission, observing its limitations as well as its powers?

Is not the command to “hallow the fiftieth year,” as a year of jubilee, and to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” contained in the same code, and in the same chapter of the same code, with that…

Of their own accord, they have excluded slavery from their borders by their fundamental law.

But what renders the argument of General Cass still more extraordinary is the fact, that, according to his own doctrine, he has spent the greater part of his political life in violating the constitution, while constantly repeating his oath…

He reminds one of the man who denied the existence of future punishment, and, when pressed with arguments drawn from the deserts of men, and from the justice of God, he suddenly arrested his antagonist by denying the existence of a God!

Under the name of liberty, he enters a path that terminates in bondage.

In using this word, therefore, to calumniate us, they put darkness for light, and light for darkness; good for evil, and evil for good.

We would avert the impending night of ignorance and superstition; they would abolish the glorious liberty wherewith God maketh his children free.

We would prevent the extension of one of the greatest wrongs that man ever suffered upon earth; they would carry bodily chains and mental chains,--chains in a literal and chains in a figurative sense,--into realms where even the…

If we are abolitionists, then, we are abolitionists of human bondage; while those who oppose us are abolitionists of human liberty.

The conduct of that sovereign who was denounced before earth and heaven as having committed all the atrocities that could “define a tyrant,” was mercy and loving-kindness compared with the wrongs and privations of three millions of our…

Compare the condition of these three million slaves with the condition of the three million colonists.