em, justice
there being more sensitive in its regard for the peculiar rights of
this system, than for any other interest or institution. By stringing
together a train of events and circumstances, even if I were not very
explicit, the means of escape might be ascertained, and, possibly,
those means be rendered, thereafter, no longer available to the
liberty-seeking children of bondage I have left behind me. No
antislavery man can wish me to do anything favoring such results, and
no slaveholding reader has any right to expect the impartment of such
information.

While, therefore, it would afford me pleasure, and perhaps would
materially add to the interest of my story, were I at liberty to gratify
a curiosity which I know to exist in the minds of many, as to the manner
of my escape, I must deprive myself of this pleasure, and the curious of
the gratification, which such a statement of facts would afford. I would
allow myself to suffer under the greatest imputations that evil minded
men might suggest, rather than exculpate myself by explanation, and
thereby run the hazards of closing the slightest avenue by which a
brother in suffering might clear himself of the chains and fetters of
slavery.

The practice of publishing every new invention by which a{250} slave is
known to have escaped from slavery, has neither wisdom nor necessity
to sustain it. Had not Henry Box Brown and his friends attracted
slaveholding attention to the manner of his escape, we might have had a
thousand _Box Browns_ per annum. The singularly original plan adopted by
William and Ellen Crafts, perished with the first using, because every
slaveholder in the land was apprised of it. The _salt water slave_
who hung in the guards of a steamer, being washed three days and
three nights--like another Jonah--by the waves of the sea, has, by the
publicity given to the circumstance, set a spy on the guards of every
steamer departing from southern ports.

I have never approved of the very public manner, in which some of our
western friends have conducted what _they_ call the _"Under-ground
Railroad,"_ but which, I think, by their open declarations, has been
made, most emphatically, the _"Upper_-ground Railroad." Its stations are
far better known to the slaveholders than to the slaves. I honor those
good men and women for their noble daring, in willingly subjecting
themselves to persecution, by openly avowing their participation in the
escape of slaves; neverth