DANIEL CONANT’S LUMBER MILL.
BARCLAY, CLARK & CO. LITHO. TORONTO
advertised him as a runaway slave, and offered $100 for his arrest.
“Any mean, poor white man, I knew, now might take me,” the old man said, “and so I walked to London during the night.” How pathetically the humble old ex-slave described his aversion to leave home and his friends! He stopped at London a week, working for wages. Being once more frightened, and not hearing that his master had returned home, he “followed the north star by night” and slept during the day, until he came to Harrisburg, Pa. From Harrisburg to Charlotte, N.Y., he walked during the day-time, boldly inquiring his way to Canada, but always careful to keep going north. He says he always had heard of Canada among the slaves, but thought it was “a land where the wild geese go to, and was covered over with feathers.” Liberty, the old man said, was sweet, and he had made up his mind to risk making a living in Canada, even if it might be a poor one.
At Charlotte, N.Y., he found a small vessel about to sail for Colborne, Ont., and he bargained for his passage by working at loading before they set out, and was to help unload on getting over. It was late in the fall, he said, and when he once set foot in Canada he did not wait to help unload the boat for fear they might take him back to Charlotte, as they wished him to go for another trip. This was in 1854, when the Grand Trunk Railroad was under construction, and things were booming in Ontario. He quickly got a job as teamster, and worked at that until the road was completed.
About this time (1856) he became a servant of my father’s and lived with the family many years, and it was from his own lips I gathered the story of his life as I have told it. Only about three weeks before his death he induced the writer to communicate with his friends in Virginia, giving his assumed name, James King, by which he always had been known here. A reply came at once, telling his real name, (which the old man confessed was right), and asking him to come back and see his friends, intimating, too, that he might be profited by his visit. His dread of slavery was too great, however, and he absolutely refused to go, but enquired most earnestly for his white half-brother, whom, the writer suspects, would now be glad, seeing that the great battle of slavery had been fought, to aid him. But it was not to be. James King, the slave, in whose veins flowed Virginia’s best blood, died of inflammation on the 20th day of October, 1895, in the land where he had sought and found freedom.
After a silence of thirty-eight years it seemed hard that the poor old ex-slave could not have gone to see his friends, and thus had a few bright days at the close of his long and lonely life.
CHAPTER X.
Civil war in the United States—Large bounties paid Canadian recruits—Prices of produce go up—More than two million men under arms—I make a trip to Washington—Visiting the military hospitals—I am offered $800 to enlist—Brief interview with President Lincoln—A pass secured—I visit the Army of the Potomac—90,000 men under canvas—Washington threatened by the Confederates—Military prison at Elmira, N.Y.—Cheap greenbacks—A chance to become a multi-millionaire.
“I looked, and thought the quiet of the scene
An emblem of the peace that yet shall be,
When o’er earth’s continents and isles between
The noise of war shall cease from sea to sea,
And married nations dwell in harmony;
When millions, crouching in the dust to one,
No more shall beg their lives on bended knee,
Nor the black stake be dressed, nor in the sun
The o’er labor’d captive toil, and wish his life were done.”