"'I have parted with some of my servants to families,' he replied,
'where I knew that they would fare as well as with me. This was always
with their consent, except in two or three cases of inveterate
wickedness, when, instead of sending the fellows to the state-prison for
life, as you would do at the North, I sold them to go to Red River, and
was as willing to see them marched off, handcuffed, as you ever were to
see villains in the custody of the officers. But had any of your good
people from the North met them, an article would have appeared, perhaps,
in all your papers, telling of the heart-rending spectacle,--three human
beings, in a slave-coffle! going, they knew not where, into hopeless
bondage! And had they escaped and fled to Boston, the tide of
philanthropy there, in many benevolent bosoms, would have received new
strength in the grateful accession of these worshipful fugitives from
Southern cruelty. Whereas, all which love and kindness, and every form
of indulgence, instruction, and discipline, tempered with mercy, could
do, had been used with them in vain. One was a thief, the pest of the
county, and had earned long years in a penitentiary; but slavery, you
see, kept him at liberty! Another was brutally cruel to animals; another
was the impersonation of laziness.
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