Horace Mann

“ They find no warrant for it in the eternal principles of justice and equity; and in that great division which they set forth between right and wrong, they arrange slavery in the catalogue of crime. All the noblest instincts of human nature rebel against it. Whatever has been taught by sage, or sung by poet, in favor of freedom, is a virtual condemnation of slavery. Whenever we applaud the great champions of liberty, who, by the sacrifice of life in the cause of freedom, have won the homage of the world and an immortality of fame, we record the testimony of our hearts against slavery. ”

“ But, in regard to innocence and guilt, where is the white line? How high up can a slaveholder go and not lose his free agency? At what elevation will the whip fall from the hand of the master, and the fetter from the limbs of the slave? There is no such point. Freedom and slavery on the one hand, and climate and geology on the other, are incommensurable quantities. We might as well attempt to determine a question in theology by the cube root, or a question in ethics by the black art. Slavery, being a crime founded upon human passions, can go wherever those passions are unrestrained. ”

“ A party of Freedom has existed in all ages of the world, but a mightier party of oppression has been arrayed against it. And though the lovers of human liberty have consisted of the greatest and best men who have ever lived, yet they have been overborne by violence, crushed and trampled upon by power, buried in dungeons, gibbeted on scaffolds, burnt at the stake! God, like the householder who sent servants to his vineyard from a far country, has, from age to age, sent great and mighty souls into the world to redeem it from oppression ”

“ Were we so constituted as to care for nothing, to aspire to nothing, beyond mere temporal well being, this well being would counsel us to abolish slavery wherever it exists, and to repel its approach wherever it threatens.
Enslave a man, and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring. The slave does not participate in the value of the wealth he creates. All he earns another seizes. ”

“ Can the oppression that tramples out voluntary industry, enterprise, intelligence, and the desire of independence, conduce to riches? Yet this is done wherever slavery exists, and is part and parcel of its working. Is any other form of robbery profitable? Yet individuals and communities have practised it and lived by it, and we may as well rely upon a “law of physical geography” to arrest the one as the other. It is not poetry, but literal truth, that the breath of the slave blasts vegetation, his tears poison the earth, and his groans strike it with sterility. ”

“ What cares my conscience, sir, whether I am in a minority or a majority, if I am right? Has any great and glorious cause ever been started upon earth, that did not find itself, at the outset, in a minority? Did Clarkson and Wilberforce open their twenty years’ contest with a majority? or were not all the office-seekers and mammon-worshippers opposed to them? Did the resistance of the revolutionary patriots to the government of Great Britain start with a majority on its side? Did the Pilgrim fathers resist conformity to ecclesiastical oppression because they were a majority of the people? ”

“ And who so hungry as those who do not own, and cannot own a morsel of bread? Who so naked as those who do not own, and cannot own a shred of a garment to protect them from cold, or from the lascivious eye? And what confinement was ever so hopeless as southern slavery, what prison was ever so deep as that prison-house which holds three millions of our fellow-beings within its melancholy walls,—them and their posterity forever? He that refuses the common acts of hospitality to these victims, when fleeing from their bondage, denies his Lord and Master. ”

“ In the section of this great country where I live, on the banks of the mighty Mississippi river, we have the true emblem of the tree of liberty. There you may see the giant cottonwood spreading his branches widely to the winds of heaven. Sometimes the current lays bare his roots, and you behold them extending far around and penetrating to an immense depth in the soil. When the season of maturity comes, the air is filled with a cotton-like substance, which floats in every direction, bearing, on its light wings, the living seeds of the mighty tree. ”

“ Now, sir, with these glorious attributes of “law,” I say the Fugitive Slave law of the last session possesses not one quality in common, nor in similitude. To say that the seat of such a law is in the “bosom of God,” is the intensest blasphemy. To say that it is “the harmony of the world,” is to declare that the world is a sphere of ubiquitous and omnipotent wrong, uncheckered by any thought of justice, and devoid of any emotion of love. To say that “all things in heaven do homage” to such a law, is to affirm of the realms of light what is true only of the realms of darkness. ”

“ Above all, think of Richmond, nature’s chosen site for the greatest manufacturing city in America,—her beds of coal and iron, just at hand, her incomparable water power, her tide-water navigation, conducting sea vessels from the foot of her falls, and above them her fine canal to the mountains, through which lie the shortest routes from the eastern tides to the great rivers of the west and the south-west. ”

“ In this capital of a nation so boastful of its freedom, the common air is vocal with the accents of liberty. Many of the colored people can read. Who knows but some of them have read the Declaration of American Independence; and, in their blindness and simplicity of mind, applied its immortal truths to themselves? “All men are created equal!” and among their “inalienable rights” “are life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness!” ”

“ I call upon Young Men to throw themselves forward in imagination into middle life, or old age, and there behold how these mighty questions will look in the retrospect of time, when the brilliant robes which now gild the tempter are gone, and only the ghastly fiend remains; when the passion that prompted the crime is dead, and only the remorse survives. Think not of luxury, or wealth, or ignoble ease, but only of an heroic conflict, careless of the present strength of the foe. Take no bribe from the hand of power, in whatever disguise of beauty it may come, but spurn it and its author alike. ”

“ On this great question of freedom or slavery, I have observed with grief, nay, with anguish, that we, at the north, break up into hostile parties, hurl criminations and recriminations to and fro, and expend that strength for the ruin of each other, which should be directed against the enemies of liberty; while, at the south, whenever slavery is in jeopardy, all party lines are obliterated, dissensions are healed, enemies become friends, and all are found in a solid column, with an unbroken front. Are the children of darkness to be forever so much wiser than the children of light? ”

“ 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? I acknowledge that after we have been proved to be slaves by freeman’s proof, then all the unutterable consequences of slavery follow, of course; just as when a man has been proved to be a murderer, the consequences of murder follow. But UNTIL, mark this, UNTIL a man has been proved to be a slave by freeman’s proof, he remains legally free. ”

“ What would a slave owner at the south think, should he come to Massachusetts, and there see a farmer seize upon his hired man, call in a surgeon, and cut off all the flexor muscles of his arms and legs? I do not ask what he would think of his humanity, but what would he think of his sanity? Yet the planter does more than this when he makes a man a slave. He cuts deeper than the muscles; he destroys the spirit that moves the muscles.
In all ages of the world, among all nations, wherever the earnings of the laborer have been stolen from him, his energies have gone with his earnings. ”

“ But why go to Europe to be thrilled with the pathos of a human being shrouded from the light of nature, and cut off from a knowledge of duty and of God? To-day, in this boasted land of light and liberty, there are three million Caspar Hausers; and, as if this were not enough, it is proposed to multiply their number tenfold, and to fill up all the western world with these proofs of human avarice and guilt. It is proposed that we ourselves should create and should publish to the world, not one, but untold millions of “Examples of a Crime on the Life of the Soul.” ”

“ No man can have any self-respect, who is not solicitous about his posthumous reputation. No man can be a patriot who feels neither joy nor shame at the idea of the honor or the infamy which his age and his country shall leave behind them. Nations, like individuals, have characteristic objects of ambition. Greece coveted the arts; Rome gloried in war; but liberty has been the goddess of our idolatry. Amid the storms of freedom were we cradled; in the struggles of freedom have our joints been knit; on the rich aliment of freedom have we grown to our present stature. ”

“ In speaking of the moral character of slavery, sir, I mean to utter no word for the purpose of wounding the feelings of any man. On the other hand, I mean not to wound the cause of truth by abstaining from the utterance of any word which I ought to speak.
The institution of slavery is against natural right. Jurists, from the time of Justinian; orators, from the time of Cicero; poets, from the time of Homer, declare it to be wrong. The writers on moral or ethical science,—the expounders of the law of nations and of God,—denounce slavery as an invasion of the rights of man. ”

“ Sir, the children of the south, more or less, and generally more, are tended and nurtured by slaves. Ignorance, superstition, vulgarity, passion, and perhaps impurity, are the breasts at which they nurse. Whatever afflictions God may see fit to bring upon me, whatever other mercies He may withhold, may He give me none but persons of intelligence, of refinement, and of moral excellence, to walk with my children during the imitative years of their existence, and to lead them in the paths of knowledge, and breathe into their hearts the breath of a moral and religious life. ”

“ While the south were seeking new guaranties for men who claim to own other men, it was a time for the north to demand new guaranties for men who own themselves. But all debate was suppressed; property vanquished liberty; and a pure pro-slavery law was enacted, unadulterated by any alloy of freedom.
In regard to this Fugitive Slave act, is it not astonishing that men should ever ask the question, Does the constitution demand the trial by jury? instead of the question, Will the constitution allow it? The first is the tyrant’s question, granting no more than he is compelled to give. ”

“ Into what infinite forms of violence and wrong would the depraved passions of the human heart spring up, when no longer restrained by the light of day, and the dangers of exposure! So far as legal rights against his oppressors are concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness. A hundred of his fellows may stand around him and witness the wrongs he suffers, but not one of them can appeal to jury, magistrate, or judge, for punishment or redress. The wickedest white man, in a company of slaves, bears a charmed life. ”

“ A law whose first utterance abjures the distinction between freedom and bondage; a law which brings the whole free colored population of the United States within the outer circles of the whirlpool of slavery, that they may be ingulfed in its vortex; a law which empowers every villain in the country, by fabricating false testimony at his own leisure and convenience, to use his own freedom in order to rob other people of theirs! ”

“ Are we abolitionists of the inalienable, indefeasible, indestructible rights of man? Are we abolitionists of knowledge, abolitionists of virtue, of education, and of human culture? Do we seek to abolish the glorious moral and intellectual attributes which God has given to his children, and thus, as far as it lies in our power, make the facts of slavery conform to the law of slavery, by obliterating the distinction between a man and a beast? ”

“ Our courts, in their functions as state courts, do not understand the meaning of the word slave. To talk to them in that capacity about a slave or slavery, is talking to them in an unknown tongue. In the eye of the legislators of the free states, and in the eye of the courts of the free states, so far as their domestic polity is concerned, there can be no such creature as a slave. The constitution of every free state in this Union must be first altered, before any such being as a slave, or any such condition as slavery, can be recognized under them, as state authorities. ”