Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/270

 this note to the three volunteer bailiffs, who still remained with me, regaling themselves with mint juleps at my expense, they heard it with an incredulous smile; and one of them exclaimed, "What more could you expect of the sneaking Yankee? He means to keep himself out of harm's way, at all events."

The lawyer soon made his appearance, and having accepted a fee, entered with great apparent, and I dare say real, zeal into my case. I begged to know whether those who had summoned me before them possessed any legal authority, and whether I was bound to pay any attention to their summons. I had supposed, I said, that the state of Virginia was a country of laws, and that I could only be held to answer to some charge sworn against me before some magistrate. Was I obliged to submit to a personal examination before this vigilance committee? To this my friendly lawyer replied, that in the present state of alarm, the law was suspended. The necessity of self-preservation rose above all law; and in the imminent danger to which the whole southern states were exposed, — the breaking out of a pas slave insurrection, — every thing must be sacrificed to the safety of the community. The throats of the white inhabitants, the purity of their wives and daughters, were at risk. Two Yankee schoolmasters had been warned out of the town the day before, and nothing but the earnest efforts of himself and a few others, and their own prudence in not attempting the slightest resistance to this mandate, had saved them from the indignity, perhaps, of a public flogging, and a coat of tar and feathers. As it was, they had been obliged to fly because they had not known how to hold their foolish Yankee tongues this perhaps was a sly hit at my own imprudent freedom of speech, — the chief witness and informant against them being a fellow whom one of them had sued the day before, to recover payment for several quarters' schooling for his children, and who, so the