Historical voices

He did not earn it; he had no hand in earning it; why, then, should he have it?

I was living among freemen, and was in all respects equal to them by nature and attainments.

The slightest show of sympathy or justice toward a person of color was denounced as abolitionism; and the name of abolitionist subjected its bearer to frightful liabilities.

To strike a white man was death by lynch law, in Gardiner’s ship-yard; nor was there much of any other law toward the colored people at that time in any other part of Maryland.

As I look back to this period, I am almost amazed that I was not murdered outright, so murderous was the spirit which prevailed there.

The impression was cunningly made that slavery was the only power that could prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.

The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves.

The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into…

Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers.

The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony.

That phase was this--the conflict of slavery with the interests of white mechanics and laborers.

He had grown and become a man: I, though grown to the stature of manhood, must all my life remain a minor--a mere boy.

In childhood he had considered me scarcely inferior to himself,--certainly quite as good as any other boy with whom he played--but the time had come when his friend must be his slave.

Here was a broad road leading to the destruction of slavery, which had hitherto been looked upon as a wall of security by the slaveholders.

The prospect from that point did look about as dark as any that ever cast its gloom over the vision of the anxious, out-looking human spirit.

The promise had but one fault--it seemed too good to be true.

Lead and steel were the only arguments that they were capable of appreciating, as the events of the subsequent years have proved.

I had hoped and expected much, for months before, but my hopes and expectations were now withered and blasted.

I was solitary and alone within the walls of a stone prison, left to a fate of life-long misery.

Why should these young men, who were led into this scheme by me, suffer as much as the instigator?

And yet I could not but feel that I was the victim of something like justice.

The innocent had been taken and the guilty left.

Bolts, bars, and grated windows are not acceptable to freedom-loving people of any color.

They were mere hucksters of the slave produce of Maryland and Virginia--coarse, cruel, and swaggering bullies, whose very breathing was of blasphemy and blood.