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Updated: June 4, 2025
We also obtained a rope of sufficient length to reach the shore, so that we might haul it backwards and forwards. This we made the blacks understand that we intended to do, and that we could only take off a certain number at a time. The head men, who had all along held an authority over the rest of their fellow-slaves, now came forward to maintain discipline.
In another tent I found a young man who had attempted to escape to our lines more than a year before, but was overtaken and shot by his master, shivering the bones six inches above the ankle, making amputation necessary. He was beginning to use his wooden leg. His master was taken prisoner by our men a few days before, and he, with one hundred fellow-slaves, fell into the hands of the Union army.
Many of his fellow-slaves, too, he had heard called Christian idiots, but still not unfrequently very reasonable men, and sometimes even Hadrian himself, had taken the part of the Christians.
Helm's plantation looked upon this removal as the greatest hardship they had ever met; the severest trial they had ever endured; and the separation from our old home and fellow-slaves, from our relatives and the old State of Virginia, was to us a contemplation of sorrowful interest.
A battle, it should be observed, possessed for him and his fellow-slaves of the oar an interest unlike that of the sailor and marine; it came, not of the danger encountered but of the fact that defeat, if survived, might bring an alteration of condition possibly freedom at least a change of masters, which might be for the better.
Michael's, a gentleman who did not forget justice or humanity, so far as they were consistent with slavery, even in dealing with bond-servants. Here Douglass led a comparatively comfortable life. He had enough to eat, was not overworked, and found the time to conduct a surreptitious Sunday-school, where he tried to help others by teaching his fellow-slaves to read the Bible.
That done he sank down with a clank of shackles to the bench again, whilst every one of his fellow-slaves that faced his way looked on with fearful eyes. Sakr-el-Bahr was seen to reel under the blow, and instantly there was a commotion on board.
His good qualities attracted the attention of M. Bayou de Libertas, the agent on the estate, who taught him reading, writing, and arithmetic, elements of knowledge, which hardly one in ten thousand of his fellow-slaves possessed. M. Bayou made him his postillion, which gave him advantages much above those of the field slaves.
In telling my own sorrows, I cannot pass by those of my fellow-slaves for when I think of my own griefs, I remember theirs. I think it was about ten years I had worked in the salt ponds at Turk's Island, when my master left off business, and retired to a house he had in Bermuda, leaving his son to succeed him in the island.
He was to move with the utmost caution, sounding his men very carefully before making anything in the nature of a disclosure, and even then avoid rendering that disclosure so full that its betrayal might frustrate the plans which as yet had to be worked out in detail. Labouring with them in the plantations, Pitt would not want for opportunities of broaching the matter to his fellow-slaves.
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