There was one heroic black man in whom Samuel Wilson felt an abiding interest. When Jimmy Franklin told the tale of his perilous escapes and recaptures in the States of Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida,—when he showed the shot still remaining in his legs—shot that had been fired at him as he ran, and, working through to the front, were perceived through the skin, like warts upon his legs,—the lads of the family looking and listening had their sympathies enkindled in such a manner as could never entirely die out. One of them, in after-years, was asked:
“How does thee account for that man’s persistent love of freedom? What traits of character did he possess that would account for his doing so much more than others to escape from the far South?”
“I don’t know,” was the reply, in the freedom of familiar conversation. “What was the reason that Fulton invented his steamboat? or that Bacon wrote his System? or that Napier invented logarithms?
“This man was a genius,—a greater man in his way than those I spoke of. If he had had education, and had been placed in circumstances to draw him out, he would have been the leader in some great movement among men.”
The narrative of James Franklin was written by a dear friend of him whom I call Samuel Wilson, but is supposed to have been burned when the mob destroyed Pennsylvania Hall.
It was in relation to these fugitives that Samuel sometimes forgot for a while his strictly peaceful principles; for there were to be found among the men of color those who could be induced to betray to the pursuers their fugitive brethren, giving such information as would lead to their recapture; or, if they should escape this, to their being obliged to abandon their resting-places and to flee again for safety.
It was in talking of some such betrayer that Samuel Wilson said to his colored friends, “What would you do with that man, if you had him on Mill-Creek bridge?” (a lofty structure by which the railroad crossed the adjacent stream,) thus hinting at a swift mode of punishment, and one that might possibly have been a fatal one.
Though with an unskilled pen, yet have I endeavored to describe that quiet family among whom the fugitive-slave law of 1850 fell like a blow. Samuel Wilson had ample opportunity to study its provisions and its peculiarities from the newspapers of which I have before spoken, and from the conversation which these journals called forth.
This horrible act gave the commissioner before whom the colored man was tried five dollars only if the man went free from the tribunal, but ten dollars if he was sent into slavery. Hitherto, men had suffered in assisting the fugitive to escape; now it was made a penal offence to refuse to lend active assistance in apprehending him.
Friend Wilson had read much of fines and imprisonment, having studied the sufferings of the people called Quakers. (Even a lady of so high a standing as she who became the wife of George Fox was not exempt from many years’ imprisonment, nor from persecution at the hands of her own son.) Friend Wilson was about seventy-five years old when the fugitive-slave bill was passed. In spite of his advanced years, however, after sorrowful reflection upon it, he said to one of his household, “I have made up my mind to go to jail.”