Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/413

 the north, they could not have been reclaimed; but it was not yet a settled question, whether, by returning back to Louisiana, they did not revert to slavery. The Supreme Court of that state had, indeed, once decided, as had been done in several other of the' slave states, that a slave once carried or sent into a free state became free beyond all power of reclamation; but that decision was made under the influence of old-fashioned ideas, which were fast passing into oblivion.; and whether the present court would stick to that opinion was more than he could venture to say.

As possession was nine points of the law, and in all questions relating to slavery, as the lawyer facetiously added, very nearly ten points, Mr Gilmore, in having Eliza in bis hands, had decidedly the advantage; and the lawyer informed us, in passing, that he had long known Mr Gilmore as a cunning, deceitful, cheating rogue; very smooth and plausible, and full of Yankee cant about duty, justice, and religion, and willingness to do what was right; but who seemed to have very little concern for any duty or justice that did not tend to feather his own nest.

We ought, he told us, if possible, to prevent Montgomery's falling into the same trap. In case of any attempt to seize him as a slave, even though he should ultimately sustain his right to freedom, he might still get into great difficulty. By the Slave Code, according to an extract that he read, "free people of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor presume to conceive themselves equal to the whites; but on the contrary, they ought to yield to them on every occasion, and never speak to or answer them but with respect, under penalty of imprisonment according to the nature of the offence."

Now, the best we could make of it was, that Montomery was a free colored person. In Virginia and Rec in the fourth descent from a negro, all the other ancestors being white, the African taint, in the eye of the law, is extinguished; and those thus