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Updated: June 15, 2025
Allured with the prospect of a large sum of the needful, the slave-catchers started back with their victim. Stopping on the second night at an inn, on the banks of the Ohio River, the kidnappers, in lieu of a suitable place in which to confine their prize during the night, chained him to the bed-post of their sleeping-chamber.
A tendency to insubordination, due partly to the freer life he had led in Baltimore, got him into disfavor with a master easily displeased; and, not proving sufficiently amenable to the discipline of the home plantation, he was sent to a certain celebrated negro-breaker by the name of Edward Covey, one of the poorer whites who, as overseers and slave-catchers, and in similar unsavory capacities, earned a living as parasites on the system of slavery.
We of the North must approach our Southern brethren in a spirit of kindness, conciliation and concession; and talk to them as brothers, and not denounce and stigmatize them as murderers, rogues, rascals, slave-catchers and kidnappers. We have mistaken Southern men and Southern character. We may lead Southern men, but we cannot drive them.
The fellow slunk away, but Jamie had ceased to listen, for the negro was now in front of him, and there, among the rough band of slave-catchers, his desperate appearance hid by no uniform, a rough felt hat upon his dissolute face, a bowie-knife slung by his waist, there, doing this work in the world, old Jamie saw and recognized the husband of his little girl, St. Clair.
After Maryland, I was to pass through Delaware another slave State, where slave-catchers generally awaited their prey, for it was not in the interior of the State, but on its borders, that these human hounds were most vigilant and active. The border lines between slavery and freedom were the dangerous ones for the fugitives.
One of the slave-catchers was left to see that the fugitive did not get away, while the others went in pursuit of an officer. In the mean time, the owner of the barn sent for a hammer and nails, and began nailing up the barn-door. After an hour in search of the man of the law, they returned with an officer and a warrant.
He showed how, before its enactment, slaves were continually escaping to the Northern States, where they were virtually out of reach of their masters. There was a law enabling the latter to recover their property, but its edge was dulled by public opinion in the North, which was rapidly growing antagonistic to allowing the free states to become a hunting-ground for slave-catchers.
We are inclined to believe that any attempt on the part of the Commander-in-chief of our army and navy to convert the good people of Massachusetts into expert slave-catchers, under the discipline of West Point and Norfolk, would prove as idle an experiment as that of General Putnam upon the Quakers.
All manner of charges were rung about Onesimus, and Paul became the patron saint of slave-catchers. Among the many devices brought to bear on the consciences of Pittsburgers, was a sermon preached, as per announcement, by Rev. Riddle, pastor of the Third Presbyterian church.
The pirates were no longer bold freebooters, who levied their tribute from the large Italo-Oriental traffic in slaves and luxuries, as it passed through the Cretan waters between Cyrene and the Peloponnesus in the language of the pirates the "golden sea"; no longer even armed slave-catchers, who prosecuted "war, trade, and piracy" equally side by side; they formed now a piratical state, with a peculiar esprit de corps, with a solid and very respectable organization, with a home of their own and the germs of a symmachy, and doubtless also with definite political designs.
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