Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/332

 stir a Boston man up, just touch him in the pocket, — and so they have got this commissioner sent on here to try this question in the courts. They pretend that South Carolina has no right to make a law for the imprisonment of free persons from Massachusetts, not charged with any crime, but merely from a general suspicion on account of their color."

"And when is the case likely to come to trial?" I asked.

"Come to trial!" said the Carolina merchant, rolling up the whites of his eyes; "and do you suppose we are going to allow the case to be tried?"

"And why not?" I asked; "and how can you help it?"

"Ten to one," he answered, "the cause, if tried, would go against us. The law in question has already been pronounced unconstitutional by one of the United States judges, and he too a South Carolina man. But whether unconstitutional or not, we think it necessary, and the niggers and the Yankee merchants must learn to put up with it. As to helping it, that is a very simple matter. The commissioner from Massachusetts has already had notice to take himself off, and all the hotel keepers, as I mentioned to the captain, not to entertain him at their peril. We shan't tolerate any such abolitionist spies and conspirators here in Charleston. In fact, if the old gentleman had not had the Yankee shrewdness to bring a daughter of his along with him by way of protector, he might before this time have found himself tumbled out of the city, neck and heels, comfortably dressed in a coat of tar and feathers. There is not a lawyer here who would dare bring a suit for him. Most of our merchants are northern men, — I am one myself, said my informant, — "but we are all Carolinians in feeling; in fact, if we expect to live here, we have to be so, and I shall be on hand to do my part, and if the old gentleman hesitates about it, to help him in finding his way out of the city. The matter has been settled at a public meeting.