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?