He finished the sentence by a gasp, and dashed both clenched fists into the haggard and imploring face of the fugitive, who fell to the deck, covered with blood. Shouting and cursing, the infuriated captain leaped on him, and seizing him by the hair, beat his head against the planks; then jumped to his feet, capering like a madman, and brandishing his clenched fists. The mate stood looking away to the horizon, with a mute, flushed face, and two or three of the sailors standing not far distant, dumb witnesses of this brutal scene, glanced at each other with mutinous brows. Striding off a dozen paces, the captain turned again, bringing down his clenched fist with a slap into the palm of his hand, and stamping with his right foot on the deck as he shouted:
“Keep a sharp look-out, Mr. Jones! The first vessel that heaves in sight for New Orleans shall take him if it costs me a hundred dollars. And if he gets to Boston, I’ll tie him hand and foot, and send him or fetch him back the first chance, or my name’s not Bangham!”
He foamed off into the cabin. Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it? Antony had received his answer.
CHAPTER I.
THE REIGN OF TERROR.
If, on or about the twenty-fifth of May, 1852, a fugitive from Southern tyranny were to arrive in Boston, he would probably very soon discover two things—first, that he must seek refuge with the people of his own color, in the quarter vulgarly known as Nigger Hill; secondly, that though they had once lived there in safety, neither he nor they could live there in safety any more.
There were, at that period, about three thousand colored people, a large proportion of them fugitives, residing in Boston, and the greater part of them lived in the quarter above mentioned. It was on the slope of Beacon Hill—one of the three hills which gave to the town its old name of Trimount. On the crown of the hill towered the domed State House; behind and around it rose, street on street descending, the dwellings of the aristocracy; and behind them, a deep fringe of humble poverty, rose, street on street, the dingy dwellings of the fugitives. There was a maxim of statesmanship then current: “Take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor.” It had been acted upon. The rich had been taken care of, and they had taken such care of these poor, that at that period there was no safety for them, as for two years previous there had been no safety for them in the city of Boston. Sidney’s Latin blazed in gold on the walls of that State House: Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem—The State seeks by the sword the calm repose of liberty. But the holy legend was dim, and not with the sword of Sidney, nor with the sword of the Spirit, sought Boston the calm repose of liberty for the poor fugitives who had fled from the meanest and the vilest tyranny that ever blackened the world.
Yet it was the city of fugitives, and fugitives had laid its old foundations down in pain and prayer. Winthrop and Dudley, Bellingham, Leverett, Coddington, the star-sweet Lady Arabella, with their compeers, men and women of true and gentle blood, and fugitives all, had reared it from the wilderness. Fugitives who taught a tyrant that he had a joint in his neck, had fled thither when the reborn tyranny again arose in their own land. Fugitives dwelling there who remembered in their own sufferings the sufferings of others, had helped frame the noble statute of 1641, welcoming to State and city any strangers who might fly thither from the tyranny or oppression of their persecutors. Fugitive hands—the hands of the Huguenot Faneuil—had dowered it with the cradling Hall of Liberty named with his name. Over it all, and through it all, and tincturing its history in the very grain, was the tradition of the fugitive. Still, in modern days, fugitives fled thither from the broken hopes, the baffled efforts, the lost battles of continental freedom. German fugitives, Italian fugitives, French fugitives, Irish fugitives, flying from their persecutors, arrived there and nestled under the broad wing of the old statute. At that period, too, the great Hungarian fugitive, Kossuth, had come, with a host of other Hungarian fugitives at his back, and the town, like the land, had roared and blazed in welcome. All these fugitives, of whatever nation, were safe in Boston. No tyrant could molest them. But the fugitives from the South—the black Americans, men and women, who had fled thither for protection from a tyranny in no wise different from any other, save in its sordid vileness and abominable excess of cruelty and outrage—there was no safety for them.