Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/241

 and the rattling of the drays and carriages over the pavements, and the crowds of people in the streets, far exceeded all my previous notions of the busy confusion of a city.

I had now been in New York about a week, and was standing one forenoon by a triangular grass-plot, near the centre of the town, gazing at a fine building of white marble, which one of the passers-by told me was the City Hall, when suddenly I felt my arm rudely seized. I looked round, and with horror and dismay, I found myself in the gripe of general Carter, — the man who in South Carolina had called himself my master; but who, in a country that prided itself in the title of a 'free State', ought no longer to have had any claim upon me.

Let no one be deceived by the false and boastful title which the northern States of the American Union have thought fit to assume. With what justice can they pretend to call. themselves free States, after having made a bargain with the slave-holders, by, which they are bound to deliver back again, into the hands of their oppressors, every miserable fugitive who takes refuge within their territory? The good people of the free States have no slaves themselves. Oh no! Slave-holding they confess, is a horrible enormity. They hold no slaves themselves; they only act as bumbailiffs and tipstaves to the slaveholders!

My master, — for so even in the free city of New York 1 must continue to call him, — had seized me by one arm, and a friend of his held me by the other. He called me by name; and in the hurry and confusion of this sudden surprise, I forgot for a moment, how impolitic it was for me to appear to know him. A crowd began to collect about us. When they heard that I was seized as a fugitive slave, some of them appeared not a little outraged at the idea that a white man should be subject to such an indignity. They seemed to think that it was only the black, whom it was lawful to kidnap in that way. Such indeed is the untiring artfulness of tyranny that it is ever nestling even in the bosoms of the free; and there is not one prejudice, the offspring as all prejudices are, of ignorance and