The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims: Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18May, Samuel
History
The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims: Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18
May, Samuel
Fugitive slaves -- United States; United States -- Fugitive slave law (1850)
taken away from the jail the night before. The jailor said he
had given her up on Wednesday night, to a man who came there
with a written order from her master, Gaines, but could not
tell where she had been taken. The officers came back and
made a return 'not found.'
The _Cincinnati Gazette_ said,--"On Friday our sheriff
received information which induced him to believe that she
had been sent on the railroad to Lexington, thence via
Frankfort to Louisville, there to be shipped off to the New
Orleans slave market.
He immediately telegraphed to the sheriff at Louisville (who
holds the original warrant from Gov. Morehead, granted on the
requisition of Gov. Chase,) to arrest her there, and had a
deputy in readiness to go down for her. But he has received
no reply to his dispatch. As she was taken out on Wednesday
night, there is reason to apprehend that she has already
passed Louisville, and is now on her way to New Orleans.
Why Mr. Gaines brought Margaret back at all, we cannot
comprehend. If it was to vindicate his character, he was most
unfortunate in the means he selected, for his duplicity has
now placed this in a worse light than ever before, and kept
before the public the miserable spectacle of his dishonor.
We have learned now, by experience, what is that boasted
comity of Kentucky on which Judge Leavitt so earnestly
advised Ohio to rely."
The assertion of the _Louisville Journal_, that Margaret was
kept in Covington jail "ten days," and that the Ohio
authorities had been notified of the same, is pronounced to
be untrue in both particulars by the _Cincinnati Gazette_,
which paper also declares that prompt action was taken by the
governor of Ohio, and the attorney and sheriff of Hamilton
County, as soon as the fact was known.
Here we must leave MARGARET, a noble woman indeed, whose
heroic spirit and daring have won the willing, and extorted
the unwilling, admiration of hundreds of thousands. Alas for
her! after so terrible a struggle, so bloody a sacrifice, so
near to deliverance once, twice, and even a third time, to
be, by the villainy and lying or her "respectable" white
owner again engulphed in the abyss of Slavery! What her fate
is to be, it is not hard to conjecture. But friendless,
heart-stricken, robbed of her children, outraged as she has
been, not wholly without friends,
"Yea, three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
Herself, her Maker, and the angel Death."
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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