Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/334

314 Massachusetts commissioner out of the city. The commissioner and his daughter were placed in the carriage, which drove off amid the shouts, jeers, and execrations of the assembled multitude; and so far as I have heard, this is the last that Massachusetts has ever done towards vindicating the rights of her imprisoned seamen.

English seamen, as I have been told, sometimes suffer under the same law. If such are the facts, Great Britain will no doubt find the means of bringing these insolent slaveholders to reason; and perhaps, through her agency, the timid and trembling northern states may sooner or later regain a free entry into the port of Charleston. It would indeed be a curious circumstance if British aid and interference should be found the only means of securing to the northern merchants and seamen, as against the domineering insolence of their southern masters, their rights under the constitution of the United States. Such an interference on behalf of humanity and sailors' rights might almost pass as an offset to the wrongs formerly inflicted by Great Britain in the impressment of American seamen.





during my journey southward, the excitement of the various adventures through which I had passed, as well as the occupation which I had found for my thoughts in revisiting the scenes of my youth, under circumstances so changed, had kept my mind from dwelling upon the hopelessness of the search which I had undertaken. Augusta, in the state of Georgia, was the last point to which, in my researches many years before, I had been able to trace my wife and child. It was now some twenty years since they had entered that town as part of a slave coffle