As fugitive-slaves were still making their resting-place with us, I hired one of them, named George Taylor, a few months through hay-making and harvest. He had made his escape from a Southern master who was about to sell him farther south. Once before he had made an unsuccessful attempt at freedom, but was captured and placed in irons, until they made deep sores around his ankles. As he appeared very submissive, the sorest ankle was relieved. Being so badly crippled, he was thought safe. But supplying himself with asafetida, which he occasionally rubbed over the soles of his shoes, to elude the scent of bloodhounds, he again followed the north star, and finally reached our home. His ankles were still unhealed. He had succeeded in breaking the iron with a stone, during the first and second days of his hiding in the woods. He was an honest Christian man of the Baptist persuasion.
MARRIAGE OF TWO CHILDREN.
On June 6, 1846, my oldest son, Harvey S., was married to Huldah West, of Adrian, and my oldest daughter, Esther M., was at the same hour married to Almon Camburn, of Franklin, both of our own county. The mother's earnest prayer was, that these children might prove each other's burden-sharers, thereby doubling the joys, as well as dividing the sorrows, of life. My daughter's husband was one of our students, and in some of her studies a classmate.
We were fortunate in again securing brother Patchin to finish the academic year in our institution. Though the cloud looked dark that overhung our institution, by the sudden deaths of my husband, and sister Emily Galpin, which caused her bereaved husband to leave as soon as his place could be filled by a successor, we had the consciousness that our school was taking a deep hold on the minds of the community at large, as well as exercising a marked influence upon the young people who were enjoying its privileges. We found an increasing interest in abolition principles throughout our community. In this we praised God and took courage.
CHAPTER III.
ANTI-SLAVERY EXPERIENCES.
This chapter introduces the reader to representatives of a large proportion of slave-owners of the Southern States, who were perverted by a system well-named "the sum of all villainies."
Willis Hamilton, an emancipated slave, the hero of this narrative, who fled to Canada with his slave wife, Elsie, to seek for her the protection of the British lion from the merciless talons of the freedom-shrieking American eagle, was emancipated three years previous to the date of this chapter, together with nineteen others (the reputed goods and chattels of John Bayliss, a Baptist deacon, near Jonesborough, Tennessee). Slaveholder though he was, John Bayliss evidently thought his black people had souls as well as those of white skins, for he allowed his house servants to remain in the dining-room during evening family worship, thus giving them instruction which, as the sequel will show, made the slave the teacher of the master; for one morning, as "Aunt Lucy," an old and privileged servant, was passing through his room, she said:
"Massa John, I's bin thinkin' a heap o' dat ar what you read in the
Bible t' other night."
"Ah, what's that, Aunt Lucy?" said the deacon.