Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/302

 consent of the county court; and nowadays that is not a thing so easy to be obtained."

"However," he added, "since I have gone so far in making a confidant of you, I will tell you yet another secret. I do not mean to remain a slaveholder except just so long as is necessary, to escape from that position with honor to myself and benefit to all the parties concerned. All my arrangements are made with that view. To give me any freedom of action in this matter, it is necessary first to clear off the encumbrances, the debts due, and the portions of my sisters. Those sisters are to set off in a few days for the north, there to be placed for their education. I mean to invest their money at the north. I hope they will marry and settle at the north. They shall have no slaveholding husbands if I can help it, and that for more reasons than one. I don't want my sisters to be the mere heads of a seraglio, with some black or brown favorite, perhaps, quite carrying the day over them in real preference. Their poor mother — you are to observe they are only half sisters of mine — suffered quite enough in that way. The poor woman actually fretted herself to death with jealousy and vexation, for which, I am sorry to say, my honored father gave her too much cause. In fact, he had very patriarchal ideas. You may easily perceive, from the variety of complexion, that, among the servants here and at Poplar Grove, there is a considerable infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood. I don't doubt that a large part of the lighter colored among them can claim more or less of blood relationship to myself; and therefore I feel the more called upon to act the part, not of a mean, selfish despot, but of the head of a family, the chief of a tribe, whose clansmen are his poor relations, who have a family claim upon him for the judicious conduct of their joint affairs.

"My plan is this: As soon as the debts are_ paid, and I have laid by enough money to purchase a good tract of land in Ohio or Indiana, I mean to emigrate