“Is not this man’s slave in your house?” asked the Mayor.
“Thou hast no right to ask that question, friend Mayor. A man is not bound to inform against himself. Thou well knowest the penalty for secreting a slave.”
Getting no evidence sufficient for a search-warrant, his house was watched day and night for a week. Friend Hopper, with perfect urbanity, tendered the planter the use of his warm parlor as a guard-house, for the nights were cold. This was surlily refused. In the morning he had a good hot breakfast prepared for the shivering men outside, but they dared not accept it. They had learned that Hopper was most dangerous when most agreeable, and feared a trick from the gift-bearing Greek. A ruse was preparing for them. At night a free colored man was employed to run out of the house. The guard sprang out of their hiding and seized him, but immediately released him on perceiving their mistake. Hopper arrested them and put them under peace bonds. This made them cautious. The next night the same negro made another rush and was not stopped. The third night it was the slave who did the rushing; he ran past the irresolute guard and escaped to other hiding, until Hopper could negotiate his manumission with the discouraged master.
On one occasion he instituted a fictitious suit for debt against a freedman in order to gain time to secure evidence of his freedom. On another, he offered to become bound to the United States for the return of a slave to court, and the simple magistrate so entered the recognizance. When the day came Hopper was there but the slave was not, and magistrate, owner and lawyer for the first time discovered that the bond was worthless, as the United States could not be a party to it. Again he entered into an undertaking to produce a slave or pay $500 for his freedom—after his master had once before agreed to free him for $150. He produced the slave, and professed to have failed in raising the $500, and demanded the return of his bond. The slave, previously instructed, as soon as the bond touched Hopper’s hand, bolted and escaped by a back door and an alley. The master was so furious at this trick that he assaulted several free colored people, for which he was arrested and threatened with such heavy penalties that he was glad to remit the $150 first promised him for a bill of manumission, and to pay some damages to the other negroes besides.
“There is no use trying to capture a runaway slave in Philadelphia,” exclaimed an irate and discouraged master. “I believe the devil himself could not catch them when they once get here.”
“That is very likely,” answered Friend Hopper with a twinkling eye; “but I think he would have less difficulty in catching the masters, being so much more familiar with them.”
In dealing with so desperate a class of men as usually made a business of man-chasing, incensed as they were by his successful tactics, Hopper was often in extreme peril, and he always showed a coolness and dexterity equal to the most daring of them. His adventures and escapes outdo romance. After making all allowance for supposed consciousness of the weakness of a bad cause on the part of his antagonists, and the moral effect of his name; after picturing his insensibility to fear, his calm, good-natured, and dignified bearing, and above all, that remarkable will-power, under which officers in the rightful discharge of their duties had been known to surrender to him—maugre all this, it seems wonderful that in the hundreds of cases he had to do with, he neither used force nor (save once) suffered by force. It seems as if there could have been found some one man in the United States cool enough to face down or reckless enough to strike down this man of peace—but there was not. It must have been the power of passiveness, the irresistibleness of non-resistance. “The weak alone are strong.” This is Scriptural eccentricity. Even in this world of force he who, when smitten on one cheek, can turn the other, may conquer—though this is a definition of success by cheek that is not usually accepted.
The solitary occasion upon which Friend Hopper suffered violence was when a posse of kidnapers guarding a negro threw him bodily from a second story window. Though severely hurt, as it afterward turned out, he gained a reëntrance, and while the guard were yet congratulating themselves on being well rid of him, he walked into the room, cut the captive’s bonds and secured his escape. He seemed to bear a charmed life, and when years later he went to Europe, he found the reputation of a wizard had preceded him.
These efforts lasted during his forty years’ residence in Philadelphia, and continued after his removal to New York (1829). Not less than one thousand persons owed their escape from servitude to him, some of them becoming useful members of society. One was a missionary to Sierra Leone, one a bishop, several were preachers and teachers. So this one tailor made nine men multiplied an hundred fold.
He made other than black men. His labors in behalf of prison reform and for the raising of fallen men and abandoned women, and the relief of the unfortunate, if less exciting, were not less apt to draw our admiration and sympathy. The story of “The Umbrella Girl,” which has traveled the rounds of the press for forty years, is a good example of his tact in conducting a delicate case to a happy end; one hardly knows which most to admire, the goodness or the shrewdness of the philanthropist. His biography, by Lydia Maria Child, abounds in narratives of these acts; it would make an admirable Sunday-school library volume.