Horace Mann

It was from the love of liberty that our earlier fathers plucked themselves up by the roots from that natal soil into which they had been fastening for centuries.

We have drunk it in with our mothers’ milk; we have imbibed it from all the lessons of the school-room and the teachings of the sanctuary; we have inspired it with the atmosphere we breathe, and our organs have been attuned to it from our…

If there be one sentiment more deeply rooted in the public heart of Massachusetts than any other, more intertwined and grown together with all the fibres of its being, it is the sentiment of liberty.

And what is it that this long-honored eulogist of liberty, but now its great apostate, blasphemes with the name of “prejudice”?

Fouler, baser, more ungodly counsel was never uttered, since it was said to our first parents in the garden of Eden, “On the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die.

A commissioner who could bring himself down to send a man to a Georgia cotton-field under this law, the first time trying, could send a virtuous and spotless woman into enforced harlotry the second time; and the prince of darkness only…

And, my friends, the keenest pang in the grief of all this is, that there is no fiction or romance about it.

The victim is seized at midnight, under some lying charge, and she is carried before a commissioner, whose conduct, were he a quasi judge, as he pretends to be, would be enough to make every hair of the judicial ermine forever detestable.

She has heard of Boston and its noble women of old, and she hies hither as to a city of refuge,--as to a sanctuary where virtue has an altar, and where she can lay down her hunted and weary body, and be at rest.

Notwithstanding her masters’ pretence that they had bought her with their money, and owned her soul, yet she had wealth, which, though all the earth were “one entire and perfect chrysolite,” it could not buy.

When about to be sent to the same market, an older sister went to the shambles to plead with the wretch who owned them, for the love of God, to spare his victims.

Perhaps, foreseeing her fate, she practised what, under such circumstances, we might call the virtue of suicide.

She was despatched to New Orleans, but when about half way there, God had mercy upon her and smote her with death.

He knew how he could transmute her charms into gold through the fires of sin.

But the fiend of a slave trader was inexorable.

The hearts of those who saw her and foresaw her fate were touched with pity.

They are ripened for the New Orleans, or for some other market, whence southern harems are supplied; as, under the Mahometan religion, white Caucasian beauties are sent to the slave marts of the darker-skinned Turk.

As to those females, I say, who are young, sprightly, and handsome, whom God has damned with beauty of form and beauty of face, because they only attract the gloating eye of passion, who can describe the loathsomeness of their life?

I speak of eternal verities, before whose massive force the heart trembles and bows itself, as reeds before the tempest.

Those objects upon which all maternal affections meet and glow as in a focus, are torn from her bosom, like lambs from the flock when the shambles are empty.

Since the Declaration of Independence, the number of slaves in this country has increased from less than five hundred thousand to more than three millions; and before the close of this century, their descendants will increase to more than…

Ladies, there are now in this land of pretended freedom and pretended gospel a million and a half of women who have no practical knowledge of what a woman’s higher life should be, or what a woman’s most precious rights are.

And what is the condition of these your sisters, in regard to everything that a virtuous and noble woman holds most sacred and dear?

Whatever any one may hold to be the social relation between free women and slave women, yet before God and Christ, and all the holy angels, they belong to the same sisterhood of the human race.

If any mortal should cultivate an abhorrence of slavery, the female sex should do it.