Cornelius took passage _per_ the Underground Rail Road, in March, 1857,
from the neighborhood of Salvington, Stafford county, Va. He stated that
he had been claimed by Henry L. Brooke, whom he declared to be a "hard
drinker and a hard swearer." Cornelius had been very much bleached by
the Patriarchal Institution, and he was shrewd enough to take advantage
of this circumstance. In regions of country where men were less critical
and less experienced than Southerners, as to how the bleaching process
was brought about, Cornelius Scott would have had no difficulty whatever
in passing for a white man of the most improved Anglo-Saxon type.
Although a young man only twenty-three years of age, and quite stout,
his fair complexion was decidedly against him. He concluded, that for
this very reason, he would not have been valued at more than five
hundred dollars in the market. He left his mother (Ann Stubbs, and half
brother, Isaiah), and traveled as a white man.
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