Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/262

 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,