names.
Considering the noble hospitality and manly character of Nathan Johnson,
I have felt that he, better than I, illustrated the virtues of the
great Scottish chief. Sure I am, that had any slave-catcher entered his
domicile, with a view to molest any one of his household, he would have
shown himself like him of the "stalwart hand."

The reader will be amused at my ignorance, when I tell the notions I had
of the state of northern wealth, enterprise, and civilization. Of wealth
and refinement, I supposed the north had none. My _Columbian Orator_,
which was almost my only book, had not done much to enlighten me
concerning northern society. The impressions I had received were all
wide of the truth. New Bedford, especially, took me by surprise, in
the solid wealth and grandeur there exhibited. I had formed my notions
respecting the social condition of the free states, by what I had seen
and known of free, white, non-slaveholding people in the slave states.
Regarding slavery as the basis of wealth, I fancied that no people
could become very wealthy without slavery. A free white man, holding
no slaves, in the country, I had known to be the most ignorant and
poverty-stricken of men, and the laugh{268} ing stock even of slaves
themselves--called generally by them, in derision, _"poor white trash_."
Like the non-slaveholders at the south, in holding no slaves, I suppose
the northern people like them, also, in poverty and degradation. Judge,
then, of my amazement and joy, when I found--as I did find--the very
laboring population of New Bedford living in better houses, more
elegantly furnished--surrounded by more comfort and refinement--than a
majority of the slaveholders on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. There was
my friend, Mr. Johnson, himself a colored man (who at the south would
have been regarded as a proper marketable commodity), who lived in a
better house--dined at a richer board--was the owner of more books--the
reader of more newspapers--was more conversant with the political and
social condition of this nation and the world--than nine-tenths of
all the slaveholders of Talbot county, Maryland. Yet Mr. Johnson was a
working man, and his hands were hardened by honest toil. Here, then,
was something for observation and study. Whence the difference? The
explanation was soon furnished, in the superiority of mind over
simple brute force. Many pages might be given to the contrast, and in
explanation of its causes. But an in