'Wal, I've seed shows,' moralized Jonas, 'a good many on 'em; but I couldn't tell the yarns about 'em that Mr. Richard, here, does. He figurs on 'em considerable, I 'xpect.''
Fugitives At The West.
A distinguished French writer once remarked, that the position of the colored race in America includes in itself every element of romance. The fortunes of this great human family; its relations to the white race, with which it is growing up side by side; its developments, its struggles, and its coming destiny, must hold in the future an historic interest of which it would be difficult beforehand to form an intelligent appreciation. The political events of the last few months have fairly opened this new historic page; and though, for the most part, its recording lines still lie behind the cloud, the first few words, charged with deep import to us and to all men, are becoming legible to every eye.
We can no longer view the colored race as a mere mass of ignorance and degradation lying quiescent beneath the white man's foot, and, except as a useful species of domestic animal, of little consequence to us or to the world. We see to-day, its fortunes and those of our own race blended together in a great struggle based on political, moral, and religious questions, and leading to a series of events of which not one of us as yet can foretell the conclusion.
The collective romance of the race is now but just opening to us; but its individual romance dawned upon us years ago. Long as we can remember, we have heard of one and another of that depressed people struggling to escape from an overwhelming bondage. We have known that such attempts were marked by scenes of thrilling interest, by intense earnestness of purpose, by the most powerful emotions of hope and fear, by startling adventures, ending sometimes in hopeless tragedy, sometimes in a dearly-bought success. Before the fugitive lay on one hand death, or worse than death; on the other, liberty beneath the cold North-star.
Some years ago, these elements of romance, with the moral principles lying at their root, were laid hold of by Mrs. Stowe. The wonderful enthusiasm with which her work was received, the avidity with which it was read all the world over, showed how wide and deep was the sympathy which the position of the colored race in America was calculated to excite.
I suppose there are few people living on the border-line dividing the North from the South, who can not recall exciting incidents and scenes of painful interest connected with the fugitive slave, occurring within their own knowledge, and often beneath their own eyes. During the few years when I grew from childhood to youth, in the neighborhood of Cincinnati, I can recall many such incidents. I remember being startled, from time to time, by sorrowful events of this nature that so frequently occur in Western cities, owing to their close proximity to the South, and to the continual arrival of steamboats from the slaveholding States. Once I remember, it was a family of half-caste children, brought to the very levee by their white father. He had made the journey during his death-struggle, hoping to leave his children free men upon free ground: but just as he approached the levee, he died; and his heir, in eager pursuit, seized the children around their father's lifeless form, before they had time to land, and hurried them away, his hopeless, helpless slaves. Then it was a woman with a child in her arms, flying through the great thoroughfares of the city, with her pursuers behind her—a mad, wild, brutal chase. Then it was a pretty mulatto child, the pride and delight of its parents, abstracted in the evening by prowling thieves, from a colored family in our immediate vicinity. Lost forever! never more to be heard of by its terrified and sorrowing parents! Then came the terrible tragedy of that poor mother who, being seized as she was escaping with her children, and thrown into jail, 'preferred for her dear ones the guardianship of angels to the oppression of man,' and killed them in the prison with her own hands, one by one, the jailer only entering in time to arrest the knife as she was about to strike it into her own despairing heart.
But though from time to time circumstances such as these were noised abroad and made known to all, I knew that there were innumerable thrilling stories, often less tragic in their conclusion, known only to the more successful fugitive and his own immediate friends. I heard rumors of an underground railway, as it was termed, a mysterious agency keeping watch for fugitives, and assisting them on their journey, passing them on secretly and speedily from point to point on their way to Canada. I knew that such a combination existed on my right hand and on my left, and under my very eyes; but who might be concerned in it, or how it might be managed, I could not in the least divine. One day a gleam of light came to me upon the subject. Our minister, a good old man, who preached with great eloquence on the subject of human depravity, and pointedly enough upon many of the sins of the age, but who had never taken any clear and open ground on the subject of slavery, had a daughter who was warmly and avowedly anti-slavery in principle. We became friends; and as my intimacy with her increased, we sometimes spoke of the fugitives.