Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/116

 I soon made myself acquainted with a number of my fellow prisoners, and entered into conversation with them. Some of them had been in the jail a fortnight, and others longer. I presently discovered that they considered their confinement as a sort of holyday. They had nothing to do; and not to be compelled to work seemed, for them, the supreme idea of happiness. As to being confined within the walls of a prison; they had the liberty of the yard, and it was just as agreeable being shut up within four brick walls, as to be prisoner on a plantation, forbidden to go beyond the line of its zig-zag fences. Then they had no overseer to harass them, and nothing to do but to dance and sleep. Nothing was wanted but a little whiskey, and even that was not always wanting. "They seemed anxious to drown all memory of the past, and all dread of the future, and to bask without concern, in the sunshine of their present felicity.





I had been in the jail ten days or a fortnight, when Messrs Savage, Brothers & Co selected from among their chattels a cargo of slaves for the Charleston market. I was one of the number; and with some fifty others, was loaded on board a small vessel bound for that port. The captain's name was Jonathan Osborne. He was a citizen of Boston, and the vessel, the brig Two Sallys, belonged to that port, and was the property of a rich and respectable merchant.

The people of the northern States of the American Union, talk finely upon the subject of slavery, and express a very proper indignation at its horrors. Yet while the African slave-trade was permitted, their merchants carried it on; and these same merchants do not always refuse to employ their vessels in the domestic slave-trade, a traffic not one iota less base and' detestable.

Northern statesmen have permitted slavery where no constitutional objections prevented them from abolishing it; 