found that it had also some annoying consequences. Under the old
marshal, either to make the imprisonment more disagreeable to me, or
from fear lest I should corrupt the other prisoners, I had been kept in
a sort of solitary confinement, no other prisoners being placed in the
same passage. This system was now altered; and, although my privacy was
always so far respected that I was allowed a cell by myself, I often
found myself with fellow-prisoners in the same passage from whose
society it was impossible for me to derive either edification or
pleasure. I suffered a good deal from this cause; but at length
succeeded in obtaining a remedy, or, at least, a partial one. I was
allowed, during the day-time, the range of the debtors' apartments, a
suite of spacious, airy and comfortable rooms, in which there were
seldom more than one or two tenants. I pleaded hard to be removed to
these apartments altogether,--to be allowed to sleep there, as well as
to pass the days there. As it was merely for the non-payment of a sum of
money that I was held, I thought I had a right to be treated as a
debtor. But those apartments were so insecure, that the keepers did not
care to trust me there during the night.
By this change of quarters my condition was a good deal improved. I not
only had ample conveniences for reading, but I improved the opportunity
to learn to write, having only been able to sign my name when T was
committed to the prison.
But a jail, after all, is a jail; and I longed and sighed to obtain my
liberty, and to enjoy again the society of my wife and children. Had it
been wished to impress my mind in the strongest manner with the horrors
of slavery, no better method could have been devised than this
imprisonment in the Washington jail. I felt personally what it was to be
restrained of my liberty; and, as many of the prisoners were runaway
slaves, or slaves committed at the request of their masters, I saw a
good deal of what slaves are exposed to. Of this I shall here give but a
single instance. Wallace, the marshal, as I have already mentioned, had
two female slaves, the last remnants of the large slave-property which
he had inherited from his father. One of these was a young and very
comely mulatto girl, whom Wallace had made his housekeeper, and whom he
sought to make also his concubine. But, as the girl already had a child
by a young white man, to whom she was attached, she steadily repelled
all his advances. Not succeeding by persuasion, this scion of the
aristocracy of the Old Dominion--this Virginian gentleman, and marshal
of the United States for the District of Columbia--shut the girl up in
the jail of the District, in hopes of thus breaking her to his will;
and, as she proved obstinate, he finally sold her. He then turned his
eyes on the other woman,--his property,--Jemima, our cook, already the
mother of three children. But she set him at open defiance. As she
wished to be sold, he had lost the greatest means of controlling her;
and as she openly threatened, before all the keepers, to tear every rag
of clothing off his body if he dared lay his hand upon her, he did not
venture, to brave her fury.
In most of the states, if not in all of them, certainly in all the free
states, there is no such thing as keeping a man in prison for life
merely for the non-payment of a fine which he has no means to pay. The
same spirit of humanity which has abolished the imprisonment of poor
debtors at the caprice of their creditors has provided means for
discharging, after a short imprisonment, persons held in prison for
fines which they have no means of paying. Indeed, what can be more
unequal or unjust than to hold a poor man a prisoner for life for an
offence which a rich man is allowed to expiate by a small part of his
superfluous wealth? But this is one, among many other barbarisms, which
the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia, by preventing any
systematic revision of the laws, has entailed upon the capital of our
model democracy. There was, as I have stated, no means by which Sayres
and myself could be discharged from prison except by paying our fines
(which was totally out of the question), or by obtaining a presidential
pardon, which, for a long time, seemed equally hopeless. There was,
indeed, a peculiarity about our case, such as might afford a plausible
excuse for not extending to us any relief. Under the law of 1796, the
sums imposed upon us as fines were to go one half to the owners of the
slaves, and the other half to the District; and it was alleged, that
although the President might remit the latter half, he could not the
other.
That same Mr. Radcliff whom I have already had occasion to mention
volunteered his services--for a consideration--to get over this
difficulty. In consequence of a handsome fee which he received, he
undertook to obtain the consent of the owners of the slaves to our
discharge. But, having pocketed the money, he made, so far as I could
find, very little progress in the business, not having secured above
five or six signers. In answer to my repeated applications, he at length
proposed that my wife and youngest daughter should come on to
"Washington to do the business which he had undertaken, and for which he
had secured a handsome payment in advance. They came on accordingly,
and, by personal application, succeeded in obtaining, in all, the
signatures of twenty-one out of forty-one, the whole number. The
reception which they met with from different parties was very different,
showing that there is among slave-holders as much variety of character
as among other people. Some signed with alacrity, saying that, as no
slaves had been lost, I had been kept in jail too long already. Others
required much urging. Others positively refused. Some even added
insults. Young Francis Dodge, of Georgetown, would not sign, though my
life had depended upon it. One wanted me hung, and another tarred and
feathered. One pious church-member, lying on his death-bed, as he
supposed, was persuaded to sign; but he afterwards drew back, and
nothing could prevail on him to put his name to the paper. Die or live,
he wholly refused. But the most curious case occurred at Alexandria, to
which place my wife went to obtain the signature of a pious old lady,
who had been the claimant of a youngster found among the passengers of
the Pearl, and who had been sold, in consequence, for the southern
market. The old lady, it appeared, was still the owner of the boy's
mother, who acted as one of her domestics, and, if she was willing, the
old lady professed her readiness to sign. The black woman was
accordingly called in, and the nature of my wife's application stated to
her. But, with much positiveness and indignation, she refused to give
her consent, declaring that my wife could as well do without her husband
as she could do without her boy. So imbruted and stupefied by slavery
was this old woman, that she seemed to think the selling her boy away
from her a perfectly humane, Christian and proper act, while all her
indignation was turned against me, who had merely afforded the boy an
opportunity of securing his freedom! I dare say they had persuaded the
old woman that I had enticed the boy to run away; whereas, as I have
already stated, I had never seen him, nor any other of the passengers,
till I found them on board.
As only twenty-one signers could be obtained, the matter stood very much
as it did before the attempt was made. So long as President Fillmore
remained a candidate for reëlection there was little ground to expect
from him a favorable consideration of my case. I therefore felt
sincerely thankful to the Whig convention when they passed by Mr.
Fillmore, and gave the nomination to General Scott. Mr. Fillmore being
thus placed in a position which enabled him to listen to the dictates of
reason, justice and humanity, my hopes, and those of my friends, were
greatly raised. Mr. Sumner, the Free Democratic senator from
Massachusetts, had visited me in prison shortly after his arrival at
Washington, and had evinced from the beginning a sincere and active
sympathy for me. Some complaints were made against him in some
anti-slavery papers, because he did not present to the senate some
petitions in my behalf, which had been forwarded to his care. But Mr.
Sumner was of opinion, and I entirely agreed with him, that if the
object was to obtain my discharge from prison, that object was to be
accomplished, not by agitating the matter in the senate, but by private
appeals to the equity and the conscience of the President; nor did he
think, nor I either, that my interests ought to be sacrificed for the
opportunity to make an anti-slavery speech. There is reason in
everything; and I thought, and he thought too, that I had been made
enough of a martyr of already.
The case having been brought to the notice of the President, he, being
no longer a candidate for reëlection, could not fail to recognize the
claim of Sayres and myself to a discharge. We had already been kept in
jail upwards of four years, for an offence which the laws had intended
to punish by a trifling pecuniary fine Nor was this all. The earlier
part of our confinement had been exceedingly rigorous, and it had only
been by the untiring efforts of our friends, and at a great expense to
them, that we had been saved from falling victims to the conspiracy,
between the District Attorney and Judge Crawford, to send us to the
penitentiary. Although my able and indefatigable counsel, Mr. Mann,
whose arduous labors and efforts in my behalf I shall never forget, and
still less his friendly counsels and kind personal attentions, had
received nothing, except, I believe, the partial reimbursement of his
travelling expenses, and although there was much other service
gratuitously rendered in our cases, yet it had been necessary to pay
pretty roundly for the services of Mr. Carlisle; and, altogether, the
expenditures which had been incurred to shield us from the effects of
the conspiracy above mentioned far exceeded any amount of fine which
might have been reasonably imposed under the indictments upon which we
had been found guilty. Was not the enormous sum which Judge Crawford
sentenced us to pay a gross violation of the provision in the
constitution of the United States against excessive fines? Any fine
utterly beyond a man's ability to pay, and which operates to keep him a
prisoner for life, must be excessive, or else that word has no meaning.
But, though our case was a strong one, there still remained a serious
obstacle in the way, in the idea that, because half the fines was to go
to the owners of the slaves, the President could not remit that half.
Here was a point upon which Mr. Sumner was able to assist us much more
effectually than by making speeches in the senate. It was a point, too,
involved in a good deal of difficulty; for there were some English cases
which denied the power of pardon under such circumstances. Mr. Sumner
found, however, by a laborious examination of the American cases, that a
different view had been taken in this country; and he drew up and
submitted to the President an elaborate legal opinion, in which the
right of the executive to pardon us was very clearly made out.
This opinion the President referred to the Attorney General. A
considerable time elapsed before he found leisure to examine it; but at
last it obtained his sanction, also. Information at length reached
us--the matter having been pending for two months or more--that the
President had signed our pardon. It had yet, however, to pass through
the office of the Secretary for the Interior, and meanwhile we were not
by any means free from anxiety. The reader will perhaps recollect that
among the other things which the District Attorney had held over our
heads had been the threat to surrender us up to the authorities of
Virginia, on a requisition which it was alleged they had made for us.
The story of this requisition had been repeated from time to time, and a
circumstance now occurred which, in seeming to threaten us with
something of the sort, served to revive all our apprehensions. Mr.
Stuart, the Secretary of the Interior, through whose office the pardon
was to pass, sent word to the marshal that such a pardon had been
signed, and, at the same time, requested him, if it came that day into
his hands, not to act upon it till the next. As this Stuart was a
Virginian, out apprehensions were naturally excited of some movement
from that quarter. The pardon arrived about five o'clock that afternoon;
and immediately upon receiving it the marshal told us that he had no
longer any hold upon us,--that we were free men, and at liberty to go
where we chose. As we were preparing to leave the jail, I observed that
a gentleman, a friend of the marshal, whom I had often seen there, and
who had always treated me with great courtesy, hardly returned my
good-day, and looked at me as black as a thunder-cloud. Afterwards, upon
inquiring of the jailer what the reason could be, I learned that this
gentleman, who was a good deal of a politician, was greatly alarmed and
disturbed lest the act of the President in having pardoned us should
result in the defeat of the Whig party--and, though willing enough that
we should be released, he did not like to have it done at the expense of
his party, and his own hopes of obtaining some good office. The Whigs
were defeated, sure enough; but whether because we were pardoned--though
the idea is sufficiently nattering to my vanity--is more than I shall
venture to decide. The black prisoners in the jail, having nothing to
hope or fear from the rise or fall of parties, yielded freely to their
friendly feelings, and greeted our departure with three cheers. We left
the jail as privately as possible, and proceeded in a carriage to the
house of a gentleman of the District, where we were entertained at
supper. Our imprisonment had lasted four years and four months, lacking
seven days. We did not feel safe, however, with that Virginia
requisition hanging over our heads, so long as we remained in the
District, or anywhere on slave-holding ground; and, by the liberality of
our friends, a hack was procured for us, to carry us, that same night,
to Baltimore, there, the next morning, to take the cars for
Philadelphia. The night proved one of the darkest and stormiest which it
had ever been my fate to encounter,--and I have seen some bad weather in
my time. The rain fell in torrents, and the road was only now and then
visible by the flashes of the lightning. But our trusty driver
persevered, and, in spite of all obstacles, brought us to Baltimore by
the early dawn. Sayres proceeded by the direct route to Philadelphia.
Having still some apprehensions of pursuit and a requisition, I took the
route by Harrisburg. Great was the satisfaction which I felt as the cars
crossed the line from Maryland into Pennsylvania. It was like escaping
out of Algiers into a free and Christian country.
I shall leave it to the reader to imagine the meeting between myself and
my family. They had received notice of my coming, and were all waiting
to receive me. If a man wishes to realize the agony which our American
slave-trade inflicts in the separation of families, let him personally
feel that separation, as I did; let him pass four years in the
Washington jail.
When committed to the prison, I was by no means well. I had been a good
deal out of health, as appeared from the evidence on the trial, for two
or three years before. Close confinement, or, indeed, confinement of any
sort, does not agree with persons of my temperament; and I came out of
the prison a good deal older, and much more of an invalid, than when I
entered it.
The reader, perhaps, will inquire what good was gained by all these
sufferings of myself and my family--what satisfaction I can have, as it
did not succeed, in looking back to an enterprise attended with so much
risk, and which involved me in so long and tedious an imprisonment?
The satisfaction that I have is this: What I did, and what I attempted
to do, was my protest,--a protest which resounded from one end of the
Union to the other, and which, I hope, by the dissemination of this, my
narrative, to renew and repeat it,--it was my protest against the
infamous and atrocious doctrine that there can be any such thing as
property in man! We can only do according to our power, and the
capacity, gifts and talents, that we have. Others, more fortunate than
I, may record their protest against this wicked doctrine more safely and
comfortably for themselves than I did. They may embody it in burning
words and eloquent speeches; they may write it out in books; they may
preach it in sermons. I could not do that. I have as many thoughts as
another, but, for want of education, I lack the power to express them in
speech or writing. I have not been able to put even this short
narrative on paper without obtaining the assistance of a friend. I could
not talk, I could not write; but I could act. The humblest, the most
uneducated man can do that. I did act; and, by my actions, I protested
that I did not believe that there was, or could be, any such thing as a
right of property in human beings.
Nobody in this country will admit, for a moment, that there can be any
such thing as property in a white man. The institution of slavery could
not last for a day, if the slaves were all white. But I do not see that
because their complexions are different they are any the less men on
that account. The doctrine I hold to, and which I desired to preach in a
practical way, is the doctrine of Jefferson and Madison, that there
cannot be property in man,--no, not even in black men. And the rage
exerted against me on the part of the slave-holders grew entirely out of
my preaching that doctrine. Actions, as everybody knows, speak louder
than words. By virtue of my actions proclaiming my opinion on that
subject, I became at once, powerless as I otherwise was, elevated, in
the minds of the slave-holders, to the same high level with Mr. Giddings
and Mr. Hale, who they could not help believing must have been my secret
confederates.
If I had believed, as the slave-holders do, that men can be owned; if I
had really attempted, as they falsely and meanly charged me with doing,
to steal; had I actually sought to appropriate men as property to my own
use; had that been all, does anybody imagine that I should ever have
been pursued with such persevering enmity and personal virulence? Do
they get up a debate in Congress, and a riot in the city of Washington,
every time a theft is committed or attempted in the District? It was
purely because I was not a thief; because, in helping men, women and
children, claimed as chattels, to escape, I bore my testimony against
robbing human beings of their liberty; this was the very thing that
excited the slave-holders against me, just as a strong anti-slavery
speech excites them against Mr. Hale, or Mr. Giddings, or Mr. Mann, or
Mr. Stunner. Those gentlemen have words at command; they can speak, and
can do good service by doing so. As for me, it was impossible that I
should ever be able to make myself heard in Congress, or by the nation
at large, except in the way of action. The opportunity occurring, I did
not hesitate to improve it; nor have I ever yet seen occasion to regret
having done so.