A NEGRO’S LOVE OF LIBERTY.
A year or two after my removal to Syracuse a colored man accosted me in the street, and asked for a private interview with me on a matter of great importance. I had repeatedly met him about the city, and supposed from his appearance that he was a smart, enterprising, free negro.
At the time appointed he came to my house, and after looking carefully about to be sure we were alone, he informed me that he was a fugitive from slavery; that he had resided in our city several years, but nobody here except his wife knew whence he came, and he was very desirous that his secret should be kept.
“I have come,” he continued, “to ask your assistance to enable me to get my mother out of slavery. I have been industrious, have lived economically, and have saved three hundred dollars. With this I hope to purchase my mother, and bring her here to finish her days with me.” “You say,” I replied, “that you are a fugitive slave; from what place in the South did you escape?” “From W——, in Virginia,” he answered. I opened my atlas, and found a town so named in that State. “What towns are there adjoining or near W——?” I asked. He named several, enough to satisfy me that he was acquainted with that part of Virginia. “Well,” said I, “how did you get here?” “By the light of the north-star,” was his prompt reply. “How did you know anything about the north-star, and that it would guide you to freedom?” I doubtingly inquired. “I have heard of a great many Southern slaves who have made their way into the free States and to Canada by the light of that star, but I have never before seen one who had done so. I am very desirous to hear particularly about your escape.” “Well, sir,” said he, “a good man in W——, a member of the Society of Friends, knowing how much I longed to be free, pointed out to me the north-star, and showed me how I might always find it. And he assured me, if I would travel towards it, that I should at length reach a part of the country where slavery was not allowed. I need not tell you, sir, how impatient I became to set off. After a while my master left home to be absent several days, and the next Saturday night I started with a bundle on my back, containing a part of the very few clothes I had, and all the food I could get with my mother’s help, and a little money in my pocket—not three dollars—that I had been gathering for a long time. The first and the second nights were pleasant, the stars shone bright, and there was no moon, so I travelled from the moment it was dark enough to venture out until the light of day began to appear. Then I found some place to hide, and there I lay all day until darkness came again. Thus I travelled night after night, always looking towards the north-star. Sometimes I lost sight of it in the woods through which I was obliged to pass, and oh! how glad I was to see it again. Sometimes I had to go a great ways round to avoid houses and grounds that were guarded by dogs, or that I feared it would not be safe for me to cross, but still I kept looking for the star, and turned and travelled towards it when I could. At other times (thank God, not often) the nights were so cloudy I could not see, and so was obliged to stay where I had been through the previous days. O sir, how long those nights did seem!
“When the food I had brought away in my bundle was all eaten up, I was forced to call at some houses and beg for something to relieve my hunger. I was generally treated kindly, for, as I learnt, I had gotten out of Virginia and Maryland. Still, I did not dare to stop so soon, but kept on until I reached this place, where I saw many colored people, evidently as free as the white folks. So I thought it would be safe to look about for employment here and a home. Here I have been living seven or eight years; have married a wife, and we have two children. As I told you at first, I have saved money enough, I believe, to buy my mother, and I want you, sir, to help me get her here.”
It cannot be necessary for me to assure my readers that I was deeply interested in this narrative, which I have repeated so often that I have kept its essential parts fresh in my memory. But, wishing to test its truth still further, I asked him what towns he had passed through in coming from W—— to Syracuse. “O,” said he, “as I travelled at night and avoided people all I could, and asked few questions of those I did meet, I learned the names of only a few places through which I came. I remember M—— and D—— and B——,” and so on, giving the names of six or eight towns in all. “Ah,” said I, “how did you get to B——, if you travelled only towards the north-star?”
“O,” he replied, “I got scared there. I thought the slave-catchers were after me. I ran for luck. I travelled two nights in the road that was easiest for me, without caring for anything but to escape. Then, supposing I had got away from those who were after me, I took to the north-star again, and that brought me here.”
The few towns which he named as having passed through after his last starting-point, I found on the map lying almost directly in the line running thence due north to this city.
Being thus assured of the correctness of his story, I began to question the expediency of his attempting to bring his mother away from her old home, even if I should be able to get possession of her for him. “She must be an aged woman by this time,” said I. “You look as if you were forty years old; she probably is sixty, perhaps nearly or quite seventy.”
“It may be so,” he replied; “but she used to be mighty smart and healthy, and may live a good many years yet, and I want to do what I can for my mother. I am her only child I believe, and I know she would be mighty glad to see me again before she dies.”
“Very true,” I rejoined; “but you have been so long separated she must have got used to living without you. Like other old slave-women in our Southern States (mammies or aunties, as they are called), I presume she is pretty kindly treated, and such a change as you propose at her time of life might make her much less comfortable than she would be to continue to the last in her accustomed place and condition.”
“O sir!” he said, with great earnestness, “she is a slave. Every one in slavery longs to be free. I am sure she would rather suffer a great deal as a free woman than to live any longer, however comfortably, as a slave.”
“Yes,” I replied, with all apparent want of sympathy, “but it will cost you all the money you have saved, and I fear much more, to buy her and get her brought on to you here, so that you may then be too poor to make her comfortable. But your three hundred dollars will enable you to increase in many ways the comfort of your wife and children. That sum will go far towards the purchase of a nice little home for them. Now, do you not owe them quite as much as you do your mother?” “My wife,” he exclaimed, “is just as anxious as I am to get mother out of slavery. She is willing to work as hard as I will to make mother comfortable after we get her here. I am sure we shall not let mother suffer for anything she may need in her old age. Do, sir, help us get her here, and you shall see what we will do for her.” Repressing my feelings as much as possible, I said once more: “But, my good fellow, your mother is so old she can live but a little while after you have spent your all and more to get her here. Very likely the excitement and the fatigue of the journey and the change of the climate will kill her very soon.” With the deepest emotion and in a most subdued manner, he replied, “No matter if it does,—buy her, bring her here, and let her die free.” This was irresistible. I seized his hand. “Sanford, you must not think me as unsympathizing and cold as I have appeared. I have been trying you, proving you. I am satisfied that you know the value of liberty, that you hold it above all price. Be assured I will do all in my power to help you to accomplish your generous, your pious purpose. Nothing will give me more heartfelt satisfaction than to be instrumental in procuring the release of your mother and presenting her to you a free woman.”
The sequel to my story is sad, but most instructive. It will show how demoralizing, dehumanizing it has been and must be to hold human beings, fellow-men, as property, chattels; that, as Cowper wrote long ago, “it were better to be a slave and wear the chains, than to fasten them on another.”
How to compass the purpose which had thus been so forcibly fixed in my heart required some device. It would not have done for Sanford himself to have gone for his mother. That would have been like going into the den of an angry tiger. No sin that a slave could commit was so unpardonable then, in the estimation of a slaveholder, as running away.
I did not, until five years afterwards, become acquainted with that remarkable woman, Harriet Tubman, or I might have engaged her services in the assurance that she would have brought off the old woman without paying for what belonged to her by an inalienable right,—her liberty.
I therefore soon determined to intrust the undertaking to John Needles, of Baltimore, a most excellent man and member of the Society of Friends. Accordingly, I wrote to him, giving all the particulars of the case,—the name of the town in Virginia where the slave-woman was supposed to be still living, usually called Aunt Bess or Old Bess, and the name of the planter who held her as his chattel. I promised to send him the three hundred dollars which Sanford had put at my disposal, and more, if more would be needed, so soon as he should inform me that he had gotten or could get possession of the woman.
After six or eight weeks I received a letter, informing me that he had secured the ready assistance of a very suitable man,—a Quaker, residing in the town of W——, not far from the plantation on which was still living the mother of Sanford, an old woman in pretty good health. But alas! his endeavor to purchase her had been utterly unavailing. He had approached the business as warily as he knew how to. Yet almost instantly the truth had been seen by the jealous eyes of the planter, through the disguise the Quaker had attempted to throw around it. “You don’t want that old black wench for yourself,” said the master. “She would be of no use to you. You want to get her for Sanford. And, damn him, he can’t have her, unless he comes for her himself. And then, I reckon, I shall let Old Bess have him, and not let him have her. He may stay here where he belongs, the damned runaway!” No entreaty or argument the Quaker used seemed to move the master. Even the offer of two hundred dollars and two hundred and fifty dollars—much more than the market value of the old woman—was spurned. It was better to him than money to punish the runaway slave through his disappointed affections, now that he could not do it by lacerating his back or putting him in irons.
I need not attempt to describe the sorrow and vexation of the son thus wantonly denied the satisfaction of contributing to the comfort of his mother through the few last days of her life, in which her services could have been of little or no worth to the tyrant. Nor need I measure for my readers the vast moral superiority of the poor black man, who had been the slave, to the rich white man, who had been the master.