Do you ask where is that old, time-honored writ of habeas corpus, for which martyrs have died and rivers of blood have flowed, and which the constitution declares SHALL NOT be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the…

It resembles the lettres de cachet, which, before the great revolution, the despots of France gave, in blank, to villain courtiers, and villain courtesans, to be filled up with the names of those persons whose perdition they would compass.

One of them is so unspeakably mean and contemptible, that all northern men must feel the insult more keenly than the wrong.

It provides that if a commissioner will doom a man to bondage, his fee shall be twice as much as though he restores him to liberty.

In assailing all we love of liberty, could not the framers and supporters of this measure have forborne to wound us in all we feel of honor!

The cases are to be “heard and determined,” as they were under Robespierre, “in a summary manner.” Shakspeareenumerates the “law’s delay” among the causes of suicide.

It would conflict with that “summary manner” in which it is deemed expedient to dispose of human liberty.

I will not waste words to point out the impossibility of their defence, and the certainty of their doom!

Human passions feed the combustion; and the flame which the breath of man has kindled, the passions of the multitude,--stronger than the breath of the hurricane,--will spread.

Among these passions, one of the strongest and boldest is the love of liberty, which dwells in every bosom.

In the educated and civilized, this love of liberty is a regulated but paramount desire; in the ignorant and debased, it is a wild, vehement instinct.

It is a thread of asbestos in the web of the soul, which all the fires of oppression cannot consume.

With the creation of every human being, God creates this love of liberty anew.

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

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

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

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.

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

The state of slavery is always a state of war.

In its deepest tranquillity, it is but a truce.

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?

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

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

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.

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