In accordance with this decision, they returned to their new homes, resumed their habits of agriculture, and for a time all was quiet and peaceful; but their example was soon felt among the slaves of Arkansas, and of the surrounding Indian tribes. Nor is it to be supposed that the holders of slaves in any State of the Union, would be willing to admit that so large a body of servants could, by any effort, separate from their masters, for a century and a half maintain their liberty, and after so much effort to reënslave them, be permitted to enjoy liberty in peace.
Hundreds of them had been seized in Florida and enslaved. The laws of slave States presumed every black person to be a slave; and it was evident, that if they could once be subjected to the will of some white man, the laws of Arkansas would enable him to hold them in bondage.[133]
An individual, a slave-dealer, appeared among the Creeks and offered to pay them one hundred dollars for each Exile they would seize and deliver to him; he stipulating to take all risk of title.[134]
1849.
This temptation was too great for the integrity of the Creeks, who were smarting under their disappointment, and the defeat of their long cherished schemes, of reënslaving the Exiles. Some two hundred Creek warriors collected together, armed themselves, and, making a sudden descent upon the Exiles, seized such as they could lay their hands upon. The men and most of the women and children fled; but those who had arms collected, and presenting themselves between their brethren and the Creeks who were pursuing them, prepared to defend themselves and friends.[135] The Creeks, unwilling to encounter the danger which threatened them, ceased from further pursuit, but, turning back, dragged their frightened victims, who had been already captured, to the Creek villages, and delivered them over to the slave-dealer, who paid them the stipulated price.
1850.
The Seminole Agent, learning the outrage, at once repaired to the nearest Judge in Arkansas, and obtained a writ of habeas corpus. The Exiles were brought before him in obedience to the command of the writ, and a hearing was had. The Agent showed the action of General Jessup; the sanction of the capitulation of March, 1837, by the Executive; the opinion of the Attorney General, and action of the President, deciding the Exiles to be free, and in all respects entitled to their liberty. But the Judge decided that the Creeks had obtained title by virtue of their contract with General Jessup; that neither General Jessup, nor the President, had power to emancipate the Exiles, even in time of war; that the Attorney General had misunderstood the law; that the title of the Creek Indians was legal and perfect; and they, having sold them to the claimant, his title must be good and perfect.[136]
No sooner was the decision announced, than the manacled victims were hurried from their friends and the scenes of such transcendent crimes and guilt. They were placed on board a steamboat, and carried to New Orleans. There they were sold to different purchasers, taken to different estates, and mingling with the tide of human victims who are septennially murdered upon the cotton and sugar plantations of that State, they now rest in their quiet graves, or perhaps have shared the more unhappy fate of living and suffering tortures incomparably worse than death.
The year 1850 was distinguished by a succession of triumphs on the part of the slave power. While the President and his Cabinet, and members of the Senate and of the House of Representatives, were seeking the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law; while slaveholders and their northern allies appeared to be aroused in favor of oppression within the States of our Union, their savage coadjutors of the Indian territory were equally active.
There yet remained some hundreds of Exiles in that far-distant territory unsubdued, and enjoying liberty. They had witnessed the duplicity, the treachery of our Government often repeated, toward themselves and their friends—they had, most of them, been born in freedom—they had grown to manhood, had become aged amidst persecutions, dangers and death—they had experienced the constant and repeated violations of our national faith: its perfidy was no longer disguised; if they remained, death or slavery would constitute their only alternative. One, and only one, mode of avoiding such a fate remained—that was, to leave the territory, the jurisdiction of the United States, and flee beyond its power and influence.