Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

Corresponding with the oppressive character of all these preliminaries was the manner of the prosecutor, in his opening argument. He has seen fit to use language against the prisoner the most vehement and denunciatory. He has imputed to him every base motive that can actuate a depraved heart, and showered upon him the coarsest epithets that can describe a villain. Now if it shall turn out that my client is innocent, then all these criminations are unjust and cruel; and even should it be proved that he is guilty, it is no part of his punishment to be compelled to sit here in enforced silence, hour after hour, and hear himself denounced and vilified in language as unfitted to his character as to the sobriety of judicial proceedings.

Gentlemen, the representative of the government, like the government itself, should be dispassionate and calm. Majesty is one of the attributes of sovereignty, and serenity is inseparable from majesty. The government is not a being of wrath, of ferocity, of vindictiveness; and the exhibition of such passions is as unsuitable to the representative of the government as to the government itself. Though the image of justice may be represented as holding the sword of power in one hand, yet she is also represented as holding the balance of equity in the other; but when the government assumes the guilt of the prisoner, before it has been found, and denounces him in bitterest epithets as criminal, while as yet the law presumes him to be innocent,—the only proper emblem of such a government is an image which, a few years ago, might have been seen surmounting the dome of the court house in Taunton, in the county of Somersetshire, in England, to which the artist had originally given both the balance and the sword; but a storm, careering through the sky, had swept the balance away, so that nothing but the avenging sword was left; and there the hateful figure stood aloft, an image of wrath untempered by equity.

But, gentlemen, let me trust that the prisoner has at length escaped from the turbulent and perilous scenes which have hitherto destroyed his peace and threatened his life. Let me trust that the fell spirits which prompted the proposal, made by one of his captors while he was yet on board the steamboat, and previous to his return to this city, that he should be brought up and hung at the yard-arm,—as was testified to by the government’s witnesses,—is at length exorcised; let me trust that the demoniac cry of vengeance which was shouted by the mob, and the thirst for blood which their conduct betokened, while the prisoner, bound and defenceless, was conducted from the river to the jail, has found no welcoming response in your bosoms. Let me trust, also, that the violence of manner and the bitterness of language which have been so freely employed in the opening of this case, have not disturbed the balance of your minds, or so ruffled their serenity that the images of truth shall be distorted as they are reflected from them.

Gentlemen, the spot on which a jury are seated should be a place separate and apart from the rest of the world; sacred, and inaccessible to the passions and prejudices that move the community without. It should be a place consecrated to the inquiry, “What is truth?” and to the application of its conclusions to the conduct of men. When you took your seats in that place, you were severally asked by the court whether you had formed any opinion respecting the guilt or innocence of the prisoner, and you severally answered in the negative. The final opinion, then, which shall be expressed in your verdict, must be an opinion which you have formed since that time, and from the law and testimony here introduced. Into that opinion, no other element must be allowed to enter. The prejudged guilt of the prisoner, as manifested by repeated attempts to take his life; the demand which may exist, and which I suppose does exist, out of doors, that he shall be convicted, innocent or guilty; the anticipation that you are to meet an angry community, if you acquit him;—all these considerations, if they obtrude upon your minds, must be sternly rebuked and banished. The record of your verdict will survive these temporary excitements. It should be a verdict, therefore, which you can look upon, at the close of life, with conscientious satisfaction. It must be one which your children can look at with a filial and honorable regard for their fathers’ uprightness. In a case which has excited so much attention, both here and throughout the country, you, too, must expect to be put on trial; your verdict will go into the great record of history, to be passed upon by your country and by posterity.

Once, gentlemen, in the state to which I belong, a case arose in which the deepest and holiest feelings of the community were intensely excited. One of the preludes to the great drama of the American revolution was the slaughtering, in the year 1770, of five American citizens, in the streets of Boston, by the British soldiery. The supposed offenders were brought to trial for the homicide. They were defended by John Adams and Josiah Quincy,—illustrious names! The public breast throbbed with excitement. The sight of butchered countrymen made the blood seethe in the hearts of their fellow-citizens. If there ever could be a case where the law might be wrested to meet the popular outcry for redress; if there ever could be a case where the evidence might be strained and distorted to bring the facts within strained and distorted law, so as to visit a high outrage with a moral, if not a legal penalty, the “Boston Massacre” of 1770 supplied all its conditions. That cause was tried, and the prisoners were acquitted. The storm of popular disaffection soon cleared away, and now twelve purer and fairer names are not inscribed on the roll of fame than the names of those twelve jurymen, who dared to brave public opinion, and to perform an act of arduous, if not of perilous justice. Noble and illustrious bravery of the soul, which, when the yelling fiends of popular passion and prejudice beset the ascending pathway of virtue, can look to conscience, to posterity, and to God, and defy them all! Follow their example, gentlemen, and, whatever fierce sounds of public condemnation may be now rung in your ears, you will have the same glorious reward, and your children, and all the good men of your country, will honor your memories.

Gentlemen, in the vehement appeals which were made to you by the government’s counsel, for the condemnation of the prisoner, you were told that he had “invaded this District, and ruthlessly carried away more than a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of its property;” and you were warned that, if you let such a man escape, you might as well abandon at once all property in slaves. But it so happens, gentlemen, that you are sworn to try this prisoner for stealing John and Sam, two slaves of one Andrew Hoover, of the alleged value of fourteen hundred dollars only. Is each of these forty-one cases against the prisoner to be inflamed and exasperated by charging him with plundering the District to the amount of more than a hundred thousand dollars? A pretty strong effort of fancy, is it not? to work up the fourteen hundred dollars of the indictment into more than four millions in the argument! Is this to be another of the oppressive consequences of multiplying the one alleged offence of the prisoner into forty-one separate offences? Is the government’s counsel to botch up any sort of nefarious charge against the prisoner, and then call upon you to find him guilty on these strained and overwrought exaggerations of his conduct? No, gentlemen! This would be to suppose that you sit there to administer the worst kind of Lynch law,—a kind that has all its injustice, while screening itself from the odium of its violence. The object of civil society is to protect rights and to redress wrongs. For these great purposes laws are enacted, courts are established, juries are instituted, and rules of evidence are framed. Without civil society, each man would have a right to preserve his own rights and to redress his own wrongs. Civil society takes away something from a man’s rights, but it adds immensely to his powers; it makes him stronger than any individual oppressor, and, on the whole, it protects its members far better than they could protect themselves. But civil society, like every thing human, is imperfect. Once out of ten times, or once out of twenty times, it may fail to accomplish the end for which it was established. The very instruments it has framed may sometimes be the cause of its failure. What then? We do but fail in each tenth, or each twentieth case, when, without the social organization, failure might have been the general rule. And, therefore, even if a guilty person does sometimes escape, all we can say is that civil society has not done its work infallibly. It has done well, though it has not done all. But suppose this very civil society, wielding as it does the combined and terrible strength of the whole community, should turn its collected force against an innocent man, and crush him, then in what an utter and hopeless ruin is he overwhelmed! How much better for him had its powerful machinery never existed, than that he should be ground to powder beneath its wheels! Now, such might be the case with every prisoner, if juries were to act without strict obedience to law, and a strict observance of the forms of law. Any appeals, therefore, made to you, that because this prisoner may have committed some offence against law, you are, therefore, to discard all scruples and find him guilty of this offence, I regard as treason against justice, as a monstrous perversion of judicial proceedings; yes, as a thousand times worse than any guilt of the prisoner, even supposing the distorted features of the picture, drawn by the government’s counsel, to be genuine. It would be nothing less than Lynch law, perpetrated by twelve picked and sworn men, instead of a mob.

Gentlemen, the district attorney in his opening has not deigned to tell us on what law he proceeds. He has accused the prisoner of stealing often enough, but has read no statute, and referred to no decision, which creates or describes any such offence. Hence a task which clearly belonged to him is devolved upon me.

After the District of Columbia was ceded to the United States, Congress passed a general law, adopting the laws of Maryland, for that part of the District which had been ceded by Maryland. This trial, therefore, must proceed upon laws originally passed by Maryland. By the act of 1737, ch. 2, § 4, it is provided that any person “who shall steal any negro or other slave,” “or who shall counsel, hire, aid, abet, or command any person or persons” to do so, shall suffer death as a felon. The punishment has since been changed to imprisonment in the United States prison, for a term of not less than seven, nor more than twenty years. [Here comments were made at length on the preamble of the statute, and the class of cases to which the law was intended to apply.]

This act was designed to prevent slaves from being stolen. But a man might lose a slave without his being stolen. The slave might be enticed or persuaded to run away. Experience, doubtless, made the masters aware of this. Hence, fourteen years afterwards, by the act of 1751, ch. 14, § 10, it was provided that “if any person shall entice and persuade any slave within this province to run away, and who shall actually run away from the master,” &c., he shall be punished, &c.

But there was still another way of depriving a master of the service of his slave. Hence the act of 1796, ch. 67, § 19, made it a separate and distinct offence for any person to be guilty of “the transporting of any slave or person, held to service,” from the state.