The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 37
Having formed the resolve recorded at the close of the last chapter, I began immediately to make preparations to carry it into execution; and now once more I resume my pen to recount my further adventures.
I had lived for years past a life of constant uneasiness and anxiety; haunted, as it were, by the spectres of wife and child, pale, weeping, holding out imploring hands, as if calling to me for aid and deliverance. From the moment that I began to prepare for my new journey and search, I felt a lightness, an exhilaration, a relief, as if a great stone had been plucked out of my heart. Now, at last, I had again something to live and to strive for; a shadow perhaps, one so vain and unsubstantial, that ever since the failure of my former searches, it had seemed idle to attempt to pursue it. Yet how much better to pursue even a shadow, if one can but prevail upon himself for the moment to think it real, than to sit still in hopeless and idle vacuity! Man was made to hope and to act.
Before leaving England, I took care to provide myself with passports as a British subject, under the name of captain Archer Moore, by which I was known to my English acquaintances; and with letters also of introduction to the mercantile correspondents of those acquaintances in the principal commercial towns of America. It was in the character of a traveller, curious to investigate American society, that I revisited the country of my birth.
As it was from Boston that I had taken my departure, so I resolved to reland there, and thence to retrace my steps to the scenes of my youth, as the first means towards obtaining, if possible, some clew to the object of my search.
It was now more than twenty years since I had hastily fled from Boston, a panting fugitive, eager to 
there. How different from the stern and desperate spirit of defiance with which I had seen those shores fade from my sight, was the tender sentiment, rising almost to hope, with which I again saw spreading out before me that same land, emerging from the waters; cruel land of bondage as it had been to me, but where yet I might — O kind Heaven that I might! — regain a long-lost wife and child!
As we landed at the wharf and made our way into the town, we found it in a state of great confusion. A vast crowd, mostly of well-dressed people, was collected about a building which I afterwards understood to be the City Hall; and just as we approached it, an unfortunate person, with a rope about his neck, was dragged, apparently from some neighboring house or by-way, into the middle of the street. The shout was raised, Hang him! Hang him! and the gentlemen in fine broadcloth, in whose hands he was, seemed quite ready to do the bidding of the mob, and to be looking round as if for some lamp post or other convenience for that purpose. Making our way with great difficulty to an adjoining street, we found it completely choked up with a well-dressed crowd, through which, amid jeers and insults, a few women, holding each other's hands, slowly made their way, retreating apparently from a neighboring building, and for some reason or other, evidently objects of very great indignation.
On reaching my hotel, called, I think, the Tremont House, I anxiously inquired into the occasion of all this tumult. The landlord informed me, that it had all been caused by the obstinacy of the women whom I had seen in the streets. In spite of the remonstrances of the citizens, as expressed at a great public meeting lately held, in which all the leading merchants and lawyers had participated, these obstinate females had persisted in meeting to pray for and to plot the abolition of slavery; and what was still more provoking, to listen to the exhortations on that subject of an emissary lately sent over from England. It was the object of the gentlemanly mob I had seen, composed, as he assured me, of men of property and standing, to catch this emissary if they could, and to punish him in some fitting way for his insolence.
"And pray," said I, "as you have no slaves in Boston, nor, I believe, in this part of the country, why all this zeal against these good women? Being an Englishman myself, I must confess to some little interest in this unfortunate countryman of mine, whom your Boston gentry are so anxious to hang. Why need your lawyers and merchants play the dog in the manger — neither themselves do any thing to abolish slavery, nor even allow the women to pray for it?" "As a stranger and an Englishman," said the landlord, who, though in a great state of excitement against the offending females, was evidently a person not without good feelings, "these. things may seem a little strange to you. Yet allow me to suggest a word of caution. It would be an unpleasant thing for me to have one of my guests seized as a British emissary, and made to undergo the scrutiny and perhaps insults of a party of volunteer police. Suffice it to say, that just at this moment the price of cotton is very high, and southern trade a great object. New York and Philadelphia have set the example of mobbing the abolitionists, and we should be in danger of losing all our southern customers if we did not follow the example. Besides, at a public meeting held here in Boston, we have just nominated a candidate for president; and should we fail in zeal for southern interests, how are we to expect to get any southern votes?"
After this specimen of Boston, I saw nothing to detain me there, and so hastened on to New York. It was not without strong emotions that stood again. in the Park, on the very spot where General Carter had seized and claimed me as a slave. The whole scene, with all its incidents, came back to my mind as fresh as at the moment of the seizure, and I walked straight to the court room to which I had been carried, with as little doubt, hesitation, or uncertainty as if it had all happened the day before. There were a number of prisoners at the bar, the room was crowded with spectators, and a trial or examination of evident interest was going on. It soon appeared, that the prisoners were charged with having sacked and plundered a number of houses, whose occupants were suspected to be tainted with abolitionism, and of having, in the same spirit, burnt down an African church. The feeling in the court room seemed, however, altogether in favor of the prisoners, and such, as far as I could judge by the newspapers, and the conversations which I heard, was the current opinion of the city. The prevailing idea seemed to be, that the persons really guilty of the riots were those who had suffered by them, since it was their pestilent, unpopular opinions which had stirred up the mob to sack and plunder their houses.
What I saw in New York and Boston served to cure me of an error, as to America, sufficiently common. I had supposed that in the free states, so called, there was really some freedom. I knew indeed, by my own experience, that no asylum was to be found there by refugee slaves from the southern states; but I had imagined that the native-born inhabitants did enjoy a certain degree of liberty. My mistake in this respect was now very apparent. No one in New York or Boston was at liberty, at the time of my visit, to entertain, or at least publicly to express, any detestation of the system of slavery, or desire or hope for its speedy abolition, under penalty of being visited with the public indignation. Such persons indeed would be lucky if they escaped without insult to their persons, and destruction of their property. The leading politicians, lawyers, and merchants of those cities under whose encouragement and instigation these outrages were inflicted, seemed to stand in no less awe and terror of the anger of the southern planters than the very slaves who delved the plantations. Those slaves were held in. check by the whip and superior force; the northern freemen, so called, by their own pusillanimity and base love of money. In fact, already I began to doubt whether this voluntary slavery of the nominally free — voluntary on the part of an overwhelming majority, however a virtuous and noble minority might struggle against it — was not every way a more wretched and lamentable thing than the forced slavery of the laborers of the south. Hitherto I had hated a country, from whose prison houses I had with such difficulty escaped, and which continued to retain, if indeed death had not fortunately delivered them, those nearest and dearest to me. To this hatred I now began to add contempt for a mean-spirited population, in which there were more voluntary slaves than forced ones.
From New York I passed on to Philadelphia, and thence to Washington. That city had greatly expanded since, as one of a chained gang of slaves, I had been lodged in the slave prison of Messrs Savage Brothers & Company, for shipment to the south. In every village and town on my way, I heard the same execrations vented against the abolitionists, with accounts of new riots in which they had suffered, or new attempts to subject them to more legal punishments. There seemed to be a general conspiracy against freedom of speech and freedom of the press. A learned judge of Massachusetts, after severely denouncing the abolitionists as incendiaries, proposed to have them indicted at common law as guilty of sedition, if not of treason. The accomplished governor of the same state said ditto to the judge, and added fresh denunciations of his own. Almost the only person in New England of any note, as I understood, who ventured to withstand this popular clamor, or to drop a word of apology for those unfortunate abolitionists, was Dr Channing, whose writings have made him well known wherever the English language is read; but whose refusal, on this occasion, to become, by silence, a participator in the outrages going on around him, had very nearly destroyed, at least for the time, his weight and influence at home.
Washington, I found in the greatest state of excitement. An unfortunate botanist, who had been gathering plants in the neighborhood, had, from some cause or other, fallen under suspicion, as being an abolitionist. His person, room, and trunks had been searched. He was found to have in possession a pile of newspapers, which was made to serve the purpose of an herbarium, in which to dry, press, and preserve his plants. This pile of papers, on being carefully scrutinized, was found to contain some articles bearing strongly to abolition sentiments. The whole District of Columbia was at once in commotion. The unfortunate botanist had been immediately arrested, on the charge of having in his possession an incendiary publication. The alarm had reached a very high pitch; but when it was known that this botanical incendiary, this fellow who sought to entice the flowers and the herbage into a bloody conspiracy, was safely locked up in jail, and all bail refused, the city of Washington, especially the southern members of Congress, once more breathed freely, as if delivered from impending destruction.
The high degree of excitement, alarm, and terror which I found thus prevailing wherever I went, and which, according to all accounts, overspread, at this moment, the whole United States, was much of a puzzle tome. I doubt very much whether the Stamp Act itself had caused half so much commotion. Even the sacking of Washington by the British could hardly have produced more alarm than I found prevailing in that city and neighborhood. The mere fact that a few women of Boston had formed a society to pray for the abolition of slavery, or that a file of abolition newspapers had found its way to the District of Columbia, did not seem sufficient to account for so great an alarm. Even the circumstance that a Miss Prudence Crandall, somewhere in Connecticut, had set up a school to which she admitted colored children on terms of equality with her white pupils, would not appear in itself so alarming a matter, since a number of the most pious and distinguished gentlemen of her state and neighborhood, including a judge of the United States court, had taken an early opportunity to break up her school and to send her out of the town. I was assured, in fact, that this was not all. This Boston female society and Connecticut school were only small items. I was told of a grand plot formed by the abolitionists, tending to the most alarming results; no less than the cutting the throats of all the white men throughout the south, horrible indignities upon all the white women, the ruin of northern trade and commerce, the destruction of the south, and the dissolution of the Union. It was admitted by some of the more charitable persons with whom [I conversed, that possibly the abolitionists themselves did not distinctly contemplate all these ends. But they asked for the immediate abolition of slavery — a thing which could end in nothing but in the above-mentioned disasters and horrors.
I had a great curiosity to know who these formidable plotters, objects of so much alarm and terror, might be. I was not ignorant of affairs in America, but of these terrible abolitionists I had never heard; indeed, it would seem as if they had all at once started suddenly out of the ground. I learnt, upon inquiry, that within a short time past there had sprung up, in New England and elsewhere, several societies, delegates from which had lately met at New York, to the number of twelve men, where they had formed a national society. It was the fundamental principle of those societies, that to hold men in forced bondage was politically a wrong, socially a crime, and theologically a sin; disqualifying those guilty of it to be esteemed either good democrats, good men, or good Christians; and that, nationally and individually, this wrong, crime, and sin ought to be at once repented of and abandoned. These fanatical persons had rapidly increased in numbers. Several wealthy merchants, several zealous and eloquent divines, had joined them. A good deal of money, as much as forty or fifty thousand dollars, had been contributed and expended in the dissemination of this startling creed, partly by agents and missionaries sent forth for that purpose, partly by the publication of newspapers, of which there were already two or three devoted to the cause, and especially by the printing of tracts, setting forth the cruelties and injustice of slavery, which had been sent by mail into all parts of the country, even into the southern states.
It was these tracts that Had thrown the whole south, planters, politicians, merchants, lawyers, divines into an agony of terror, a terror with which even the people of the north so far sympathized as to be ready to trample under foot, for the extinction of these horrible innovators, every safeguard of liberty hitherto esteemed the most sacred. Free speaking and free writing were not to be any longer tolerated. Throughout the United States, so far as related to the subject of slavery, they were to be suppressed by mob violence.
A few hundred men and women, hitherto mostly obscure and unknown, by the holding of a few public meetings and the publication of a few tracts, had thrown a whole country into commotion. Not John the Baptist, when he preached that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, had more terribly alarmed king’ Herod, the scribes and the Pharisees; and now, as then, the murder of the innocents seemed to be thought the most feasible way of staving off the apprehended catastrophe.
As there are glens among the mountains where the faintest spoken words come back in thunder from a thousand echoes, so there are times and seasons when. human hearts respond in like manner to the faintest uttered truth, testifying to the force of it, sometimes, by loud response of approbation and applause, sometimes in deafening shouts of indignation, defiance, and conscience-stricken dread.