Some Recollections of Our Antislavery ConflictMay, Samuel J. (Samuel Joseph)
History
Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict
May, Samuel J. (Samuel Joseph)
Antislavery movements -- United States
when quite a young man, became a frequent and effective speaker
in our meetings. In 1838 or 1839 he was appointed an agent of the
Massachusetts Antislavery Society, in which capacity he rendered
abundant and very valuable services. He spent the greater part of the
year 1841 in Great Britain and Ireland. He lectured in many of the
most important places throughout the United Kingdom. Everywhere he drew
large audiences, and was much commended and admired for the pertinence
of his facts, the cogency of his arguments, and the fire of his
eloquence. In _The Liberator_ for November 19, 1841, there was copied
from a Dublin paper a speech which Mr. Remond had then recently made
to a large and most respectable audience in that city. Mr. Garrison
commended it to his readers as “a very eloquent production, worthy of
careful perusal and high commendation. Let those,” he added, “who are
ever disposed to deny the possession of genius, talent, and eloquence
by the colored man read that speech, and acknowledge their meanness and
injustice.”
REV. J. W. LOGUEN.
Soon after I removed to Syracuse, in 1845, I became acquainted with
the Rev. J. W. Loguen, then a school-teacher, and for several years
since minister of the African Methodist Church here. His personal
history is a remarkable one, revealing at times no little force
of character. He was born in Tennessee, the slave of an ignorant,
intemperate, and brutal slaveholder. He witnessed the sale of several
of his mother’s children, her frantic but unavailing resistance, the
horrible scourging she endured without releasing them from her embrace,
and her agonizing grief when they were at last violently torn from
her. Twice he was himself beaten nearly to death,--left bleeding and
senseless, to be comforted and brought back to life by the care of
his fond mother. At last he saw his sister (after a terrible fight
with the ruffian slave-traders to whom she had been sold) subdued,
manacled, and forced away, screaming for her children, imploring at
least that she might have her infant. He could endure his bondage no
longer. He resolved to escape to the land of the free, and there earn
the means and find the way to bring his mother to partake with him of
the blessings of liberty. He took his master’s best horse,--one that
he had trained to do great feats, if required,--and, in company with
another young slave of kindred spirit, also well mounted, he started,
on the night before Christmas, 1834, from the interior of Tennessee,
near Nashville, to go to Canada,--a distance of six hundred miles,
half the way through a slaveholding country. They encountered, as they
expected to do, fearful perils and exhausting hardships. At last they
reached a place of safety, but it was in the dead of a Canadian winter.
Their stock of provisions had long since been exhausted; their money
was all spent; their clothing utterly insufficient; and thus they had
come into a most inhospitable climate, unknowing and unknown, at a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account