Being thus assured of the correctness of his story, I began to question the expediency of his attempting to bring his mother away from her old home, even if I should be able to get possession of her for him. “She must be an aged woman by this time,” said I. “You look as if you were forty years old; she probably is sixty, perhaps nearly or quite seventy.”
“It may be so,” he replied; “but she used to be mighty smart and healthy, and may live a good many years yet, and I want to do what I can for my mother. I am her only child I believe, and I know she would be mighty glad to see me again before she dies.”
“Very true,” I rejoined; “but you have been so long separated she must have got used to living without you. Like other old slave-women in our Southern States (mammies or aunties, as they are called), I presume she is pretty kindly treated, and such a change as you propose at her time of life might make her much less comfortable than she would be to continue to the last in her accustomed place and condition.”
“O sir!” he said, with great earnestness, “she is a slave. Every one in slavery longs to be free. I am sure she would rather suffer a great deal as a free woman than to live any longer, however comfortably, as a slave.”
“Yes,” I replied, with all apparent want of sympathy, “but it will cost you all the money you have saved, and I fear much more, to buy her and get her brought on to you here, so that you may then be too poor to make her comfortable. But your three hundred dollars will enable you to increase in many ways the comfort of your wife and children. That sum will go far towards the purchase of a nice little home for them. Now, do you not owe them quite as much as you do your mother?” “My wife,” he exclaimed, “is just as anxious as I am to get mother out of slavery. She is willing to work as hard as I will to make mother comfortable after we get her here. I am sure we shall not let mother suffer for anything she may need in her old age. Do, sir, help us get her here, and you shall see what we will do for her.” Repressing my feelings as much as possible, I said once more: “But, my good fellow, your mother is so old she can live but a little while after you have spent your all and more to get her here. Very likely the excitement and the fatigue of the journey and the change of the climate will kill her very soon.” With the deepest emotion and in a most subdued manner, he replied, “No matter if it does,—buy her, bring her here, and let her die free.” This was irresistible. I seized his hand. “Sanford, you must not think me as unsympathizing and cold as I have appeared. I have been trying you, proving you. I am satisfied that you know the value of liberty, that you hold it above all price. Be assured I will do all in my power to help you to accomplish your generous, your pious purpose. Nothing will give me more heartfelt satisfaction than to be instrumental in procuring the release of your mother and presenting her to you a free woman.”
The sequel to my story is sad, but most instructive. It will show how demoralizing, dehumanizing it has been and must be to hold human beings, fellow-men, as property, chattels; that, as Cowper wrote long ago, “it were better to be a slave and wear the chains, than to fasten them on another.”
How to compass the purpose which had thus been so forcibly fixed in my heart required some device. It would not have done for Sanford himself to have gone for his mother. That would have been like going into the den of an angry tiger. No sin that a slave could commit was so unpardonable then, in the estimation of a slaveholder, as running away.
I did not, until five years afterwards, become acquainted with that remarkable woman, Harriet Tubman, or I might have engaged her services in the assurance that she would have brought off the old woman without paying for what belonged to her by an inalienable right,—her liberty.
I therefore soon determined to intrust the undertaking to John Needles, of Baltimore, a most excellent man and member of the Society of Friends. Accordingly, I wrote to him, giving all the particulars of the case,—the name of the town in Virginia where the slave-woman was supposed to be still living, usually called Aunt Bess or Old Bess, and the name of the planter who held her as his chattel. I promised to send him the three hundred dollars which Sanford had put at my disposal, and more, if more would be needed, so soon as he should inform me that he had gotten or could get possession of the woman.
After six or eight weeks I received a letter, informing me that he had secured the ready assistance of a very suitable man,—a Quaker, residing in the town of W——, not far from the plantation on which was still living the mother of Sanford, an old woman in pretty good health. But alas! his endeavor to purchase her had been utterly unavailing. He had approached the business as warily as he knew how to. Yet almost instantly the truth had been seen by the jealous eyes of the planter, through the disguise the Quaker had attempted to throw around it. “You don’t want that old black wench for yourself,” said the master. “She would be of no use to you. You want to get her for Sanford. And, damn him, he can’t have her, unless he comes for her himself. And then, I reckon, I shall let Old Bess have him, and not let him have her. He may stay here where he belongs, the damned runaway!” No entreaty or argument the Quaker used seemed to move the master. Even the offer of two hundred dollars and two hundred and fifty dollars—much more than the market value of the old woman—was spurned. It was better to him than money to punish the runaway slave through his disappointed affections, now that he could not do it by lacerating his back or putting him in irons.