Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/331

 in good earnest, and hastily started off in pursuit of the commissioner.

Having arranged my business matters with these merchants, and provided for meeting such drafts -as might be made on behalf of my North Carolina protégé, I ventured to inquire whether the arrest of which I had just heard the captain complaining was really made under any law.

"O, yes, certainly," was the answer. "All negroes and colored people, who arrive here on shipboard, are taken at once to jail, and kept there till the ship is ready to depart, when, by paying their board, jail fees, and other costs, they are allowed to go in her."

"And suppose they can't pay," said I.

"O, the captain, you know, must have his men, and he pays for them."

"But suppose the captain does not choose to pay."

Why, in that case, the fees are raised by selling the men at auction."

"Sell free men at auction," said I, "driven into our ports by stress of weather,and imprisoned merely for not being white!"

There was something in the tone in which I spoke that brought a slight tinge of color into the merchant's cheek. He endeavored to apologize for this law by suggesting the great danger of insurrection, if free colored men, from the north or elsewhere, should be permitted to come in contact with a slave population far exceeding the whites in numbers, as was the case in Charleston and the neighborhood.

"But what is it' I asked, "about this Massachusetts commissioner, to whom you referred the captain?"

"Why," said the merchant, with a contemptuous sort of a smile, "the Boston ship owners, finding these prison fees and expenses a charge upon their ships, have all at once been seized with a mighty strong sympathy for negroes' rights, — if you want to