CHAPTER XVI. Slavery and Slave Trade in the District of Columbia.-Robey's THE day after my first visit to the Cherokee chiefs I renewed my conversation with the slave in the breakfast-room of the hotel. I asked him how it was that he spoke English so correctly. He said that he had travelled about a good deal with different gentlemen, and had taken great pains to improve his language. He regretted much that he could not read and write. He had been married three times;-not that he had been twice a widower, but such is the state of morals among the slaves, that the purest and most constant attachment does not wait for death to dissolve it. Connexions of this sort are necessarily but physical in their motives, as they are uncertain in their duration: the most endearing ties which can bind the parties together by tokens and objects of mutual affection being liable to be torn asunder at a moment's warning. "If the owner of my wife," he observed, "should endorse a bill, and the drawer fail, he would perhaps sell her to obtain money; and we should never see each other again." 66 I asked him whether the slaves in the house were allowed to keep what they might receive as presents from the guests; and was glad to find that, though legally disqualified from holding property, what was given to them became their own. "The times," he added, are not so good for us as they were. I remember when we could accumulate something: but we are not so fortunate now." The Colonization Society, he thought, had done them great injury, by lessening the little interest that was before felt for them, and increasing the wish to get rid of them. While conversing with me, he used the word " gentleman," in what might be thought a singular manner, if the term were less indefinite in its meaning. Not being able to answer a question put to him, he pointed to another slave, and said: "that gentleman will tell you better than I can." I have often known the expression less appropriately applied. If the idea of any thing just or honorable be associated with the phrase ;-if it imply a disposition to render to every man his due, I doubt not the person he referred to had at least an equal claim with his master to the appellation. Two or three persons from the free States had been trying to convince this unfortunate man that he was more happy as a slave than he would be as a free man*. The reasons given in support of this assertion, carried with them an indelible stigma upon the national character. What a country, where injustice lays her persecuting hand upon those who have escaped from oppression!— where the brand of infamy is stamped on the scars that cruelty has left; and the bond are told to find motives for resignation in the wrongs of the free! The manner in which the parental tie is disregarded here, is such as to render indifference to the best feelings of a parent's heart a matter of selfdefence. The farmers in the neighborhood of Washington, breed slaves, as our graziers breed cattle, for the market; and a mother's agony for the loss of her child is no more regarded than the lowing *If so, why are free blacks, when convicted of certain crimes, sold as slaves? It is an odd way of preventing crime to place the criminal in a better situation than the innocent. 66 Slavery," said Governor Giles to the legislature of Virginia, in 1827, "must be admitted to be a punishment of the highest order; and, according to every just rule for the apportionment of punishment to crimes, it would seem, ought to be applied only to crimes of the highest order; but, under the existing laws, in case of free people of color only, it is extended to crimes not involving capital punishment." "It seems," he adds, "but an act of justice to this unfortunate degraded class of persons, to state that the number of convicts compared with 1 of a cow for the calf that is carried off to be fattened for the butcher. We may judge of the anguish felt by the mothers, when they are "weeping for their children, and will not be comforted," by an event that occurred in 1828 at Yorkville, in South Carolina. A negro woman was executed there for the murder of her own child. "We are informed," says 'The Pioneer' of that place," that she made a confession of the crime with which she was charged, and assigned as her reason for doing so, that her master intended to sell her." She would have been separated, perhaps for ever, from her child. The thought of this drove her to madness. It is not sufficient for the national dishonor, that the district marked out for the residence and immediate jurisdiction of the general government should be polluted by slavery. Here, under the eyes of Congress,-in defiance of public opinion,—and as if courting the observation of assembled legislators and ambassadors, a traffic, the most base and revolting, is carried on by a set of ruffians, with whom it would be the greatest injustice to compare our resurrectionmen. They are called slave-traders, and their occupation is to kidnap every colored stranger they can lay their hands on. No matter whether he be free the whole population, exceeding 35,000, is extremely small, and would serve to shew, that even this description of our population is less demoralized than is generally supposed." The truth will come out occasionally. or not, his papers, if he chance to have any they can get at, are taken from him; and he is hurried to gaol, from whence, under pretence that the documents he has in his possession are not satisfactory, or that he is unable to pay the expenses of his arrest and detention, he is sent off to the southern market. Men, women, and children, indiscriminately, who come to Washington in search of employment, or to visit their friends, are liable to be carried off by these land-sharks; one of whom boasted to a man, from whom I had the statement, that he had just made forty dollars by a job. Proprietors of slaves would be ungrateful if they did not connive at the iniquities of the kidnapper. The net that is laid for the unfriended free man is pretty sure to catch the runaway. These villains deal with the drivers and agents, and sometimes with the planters themselves. A poor fellow, whose claims to freedom were pronounced defective, was purchased by one of them, not long ago, for a dollar, and sold the next day for four hundred. About the same time, a colored young woman was entering the city from the country, when she was pursued by one of these blood-hounds; and, to escape, threw herself into the river, and was drowned. No notice whatever was taken of this horrible occurrence by the public papers, though it was a matter of notoriety. Another woman, to save her children, who would all have been doomed to slavery, if her claims to freedom had been rejected, |