Through all the gradations, from the person who has the preternatural whiteness of an Albino to one whom you can see in the darkest midnight, because he is so solid black,--all, all, under our constitution and laws, are alike freemen, or…

Notwithstanding the commissioner’s decision makes us all slaves, yet I maintain that, in the eye of the law, we are all free.

How then can any one of us freemen be robbed of liberty and property, and turned into a slave, but by freeman’s proof,--that is, trial by jury?

But UNTIL, mark this, =UNTIL= a man has been proved to be a slave by freeman’s proof, he remains legally free.

If there be any one right known to the common law more important and sacred than all others, it is the right of confronting and cross-examining the witnesses who are brought to testify against us.

Without this right, there is no fraud that cannot be practised upon the most honest man, and no guilt that cannot be proved against the most innocent one.

The fear of this cross-examination “casting its shadows before,” has prevented thousands and tens of thousands from swearing falsely.

I appeal to all history to prove, that no judge who ever sat upon a bench where the common law was recognized and administered, however corrupt he may have been, ever advanced a more atrocious doctrine.

And are we to expect that the brutalized, chattelized “cattle” of the south will have less of that natural yearning and longing of the soul, at the loss of their offspring, than the animals of the farmer’s yard?

Can we suppose that God has not planted the instinct of a mother’s love too deep to be destroyed but by the destruction of the being herself in whom it was planted?

A man must have a heart before he can feel, as he must have eyes before he can see.

O, who can paint a sunbeam to the blind, Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?

If the legal relations of slavery did not sustain the moral ones, as the root sustains the branches and nourishes the fruit, those moral relations would seem to demand all our attention.

I saw, then, as I had never seen before, what a vital and inextinguishable interest every human being has in this subject;--not the slaves alone, but the free men; not voters only, but all who can be affected by votes; not men only, but…

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.

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

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.

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…

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

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?

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.

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

But the fiend of a slave trader was inexorable.

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

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