“Dunno, Massa.”
Another turn of the screw, and in the agony of despair the boy yelled, “Dunno, dunno, Massa, dunno,” and swooned away.
After resuscitation the torture was again applied, but nothing farther was elicited, as the boy continued to aver he had never heard the name of the man who was to lead him; and, indeed, he had met him only in the dark.
Though for years slaves had from time to time been stealing away from the kind attentions of their masters, and, indeed, very frequently of late, yet never before had the latter dreamed that their “chattel” went by subterranean transit, and the theme became one of such absorbing interest that, when two months later five prominent slaves escaped from the city in a single night, a Washington morning paper heralded the matter before the world for the first time as follows:—
“UNDERGROUND RAILROAD!
A Mystery Not Yet Solved.”
“The abolition incendiaries are undermining, not only our domestic institutions, but the very foundations of our Capitol. Our citizens will recollect that the boy Jim, who was arrested last August, while lurking about the Capitol, would disclose nothing until he was subject to torture by screwing his fingers in a blacksmith’s vice, when he acknowledged that he was to have been sent north by railroad; was to have started near the place where he stood when discovered by the patrol. He refused to tell who was to aid him—said he did not know—and most likely he did not. Nothing more could be got from him until they gave the screw another turn, when he said: ‘The railroad goes under ground all the way to Boston.’ Our citizens are losing all their best servants. Some secret Yankee arrangement has been contrived by which they ‘stampede’ from three to eight at a time, and no trace of them can be found until they reach the interior of New York or the New England States. They can not have gone by railroad, as every station is closely watched by a secret police, yet there is no other conveyance by which a man can reach Albany in two days. That they have done so, is now clearly demonstrated. Colonel Hardy, a tobacco planter residing in the District, about five miles from the city, lost five more slaves last Sunday evening. They were pursued by an expert slave catcher, but no trace of them was discovered. The search was abandoned this morning, the Colonel having received a paper called the Liberty Press, printed in Albany, with the following article so marked as to claim his attention:
“‘Arrived, this morning, by our fast train, three men and two women. They were claimed as slaves by Colonel Hardy, of the District of Columbia, but became dissatisfied with the Colonel’s ways of bucking Harry, making love to Nancy and other similar displays of masterly affection, and left the old fellow’s premises last Sunday evening, arriving at our station by the quickest passage on record.’
“The article recites many incidents that have transpired in the Colonel’s family, that correspond so exactly with facts that the Colonel says: ‘Nobody but Kate could have told that story!’ Said article closes by saying: ‘Now, Colonel H., please give yourself no trouble about these friends of yours, for they will be safe under the protection of the British Lion before this meets your eyes.’”
The term which had been given to poor Jim, in confidence, as the means by which he was to make his escape from bondage, and extorted from him by torture, having thus been given to the world from the city of Washington, became henceforth the universal appelation for a corporation which, for more than twenty years thereafter, extended its great trunk lines across all the northern states from Mason and Dixon’s line and the Ohio River to the Queen’s Dominion, and its ramifications far into the southern states. It was most efficiently officered, and had its side tracks, connections and switches; its stations and eating houses all thoroughly well recognized by the initiated; its station agents and conductors, men undaunted in danger and unswerving in their adherence to principle; its system of cypher dispatches, tokens and nomenclature which no attaché ever revealed except to those having a right to receive them, and its detective force characterized by a shrewdness in expedients and a versatility of strategy which attached to any mere money making enterprise would have put “millions in it.” It received the support of men and women from every class, sect, and party, though from some more than from others; its character was engraven, as by a pen of fire, in the hearts and consciences of men, burning deeper and deeper, until finally abrogated in that grand emancipation proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, when it was found that its stock, always unwatered but by tears, had yielded an incomputable percentage in the freedom secured to over thirty-six thousand fugitives from human bondage, and embodied in houses, lands, schools, churches and social and domestic happiness.