Congressman Horace Mann, September 12, 1850

SEPT. 12.

What I wished to tell you yesterday was what Miss Dix had just told me about her hospital in New Jersey. One gentleman has given money enough — several hundred dollars to place a fountain in the yard; another to buy a magic lantern for the amusement of the patients; and she had just asked a Mr. King, a member of the House, to give her money for a library, and he had given it. So she was all smiles and delight when I saw her. Think of her going round, first to establish hospitals; then to fill them, and to take care of them; and then to enrich them with libraries and apparatus, and beautify them with embellishments!

I have been writing so far while the clerk was calling the yeas and nays on the Fugitive-slave Bill, an outrageous bill; not so bad as the one I denounced in my second letter, but one which will make abolitionists by battalions and regiments.

It has just passed by a vote of 105 to 73, an enormous majority. I think this bill will inflame the country more than the Territorial bills; but I do not know but the nerve of the country has been so often excited, that it has lost its susceptibility. I cannot speak with any composure of this series of diabolical measures. What makes it all so terrible is, that these bills passed by treachery, the grossest treachery of those who were chosen to do directly the opposite thing. I wish I had my former force with which to curse the measures, if not the men!

SOURCE: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 326

Congressman Horace Mann to Samuel Downer, September 13, 1850

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13, 1850.

MY DEAR DOWNER,—I wrote you nothing about affairs; and how could I? The atmosphere is full of treachery. If what was done about New Mexico and Texas shocks every honest mind, what will be said of the Fugitive-slave Bill?

By the way, in the "Boston Courier" of Tuesday they pretend to give the Texas Boundary Bill; but they wholly omit the clause at the end, by which an additional slave State is given to Texas. So I see, in the "Union" of this morning, they profess to give the Fugitive-slave Bill, but leave out from the fifth section one of the most obnoxious and outrageous provisions which the bill contains. I have seen these bills quoted falsely in other Northern papers. Is this ignorance, or falsehood?

You do not tell me how this series of measures strikes the Northern mind. Are they all dead in Massachusetts? Will there be no re-action? or will the Whigs face about, and go for slavery in 1850, as the Democrats did for Texas in 1846? . . .

We had no chance to amend the Fugitive-slave Bill. It was hardly anticipated that not a moment's debate or chance for amendment would be allowed. . . .

If the friends of freedom do not rally on this, they are dead for half a century.

Does the "Atlas" lie down, and take it without one kick? Do all the Boston papers take command, as expressed by Byron?—

"Kiss the rod;

For, if you don't, I'll lay it on, by God!"

Yours ever and truly,

HORACE MANN.

SOURCE: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 329