I remain your humble servant,
Thomas Ducket.
You can direct your letters to Thomas Ducket, in care of Mr. Samuel T. Harrison, Louisiana, near Bayou Goula. For God’s sake let me hear from you all. My wife and children are not out of my mind day nor night.]
[22]. The words of the Georgia Annual Conference: Resolved, “That slavery, as it exists in the United States, is not a moral evil.”
CHAPTER VIII.
KIDNAPPING.
The principle which declares that one human being may lawfully hold another as property leads directly to the trade in human beings; and that trade has, among its other horrible results, the temptation to the crime of kidnapping.
The trader is generally a man of coarse nature and low associations, hard-hearted, and reckless of right or honor. He who is not so is an exception, rather than a specimen. If he has anything good about him when he begins the business, it may well be seen that he is in a fair way to lose it.
Around the trader are continually passing and repassing men and women who would be worth to him thousands of dollars in the way of trade,—who belong to a class whose rights nobody respects, and who, if reduced to slavery, could not easily make their word good against him. The probability is that hundreds of free men and women and children are all the time being precipitated into slavery in this way.
The recent case of Northrop, tried in Washington, D. C., throws light on this fearful subject. The following account is abridged from the New York Times: