the seats. In dragging me out, on this
occasion, it must have cost the company twenty-five or thirty dollars,
for I tore up seats and all. So great was the excitement in Lynn, on
the subject, that the superintendent, Mr. Stephen A. Chase, ordered the
trains to run through Lynn without stopping, while I remained in that
town; and this ridiculous farce was enacted. For several days the trains
went dashing through Lynn without stopping. At the same time that they
excluded a free colored man from their cars, this same company
allowed slaves, in company with their masters and mistresses, to ride
unmolested.

After many battles with the railroad conductors, and being roughly
handled in not a few instances, proscription was at last abandoned; and
the "Jim Crow car"--set up for the degradation of colored people--is
nowhere found in New England. This result was not brought about without
the intervention of the people, and the threatened enactment of a law
compelling railroad companies to respect the rights of travelers. Hon.
Charles Francis Adams performed signal service in the Massachusetts
legislature, in bringing this reformation; and to him the colored
citizens of that state are deeply indebted.

Although often annoyed, and sometimes outraged, by this prejudice
against color, I am indebted to it for many passages of quiet amusement.
A half-cured subject of it is sometimes driven into awkward straits,
especially if he happens to get a genuine specimen of the race into his
house.{311}

In the summer of 1843, I was traveling and lecturing, in company with
William A. White, Esq., through the state of Indiana. Anti-slavery
friends were not very abundant in Indiana, at that time, and beds were
not more plentiful than friends. We often slept out, in preference
to sleeping in the houses, at some points. At the close of one of our
meetings, we were invited home with a kindly-disposed old farmer, who,
in the generous enthusiasm of the moment, seemed to have forgotten that
he had but one spare bed, and that his guests were an ill-matched pair.
All went on pretty well, till near bed time, when signs of uneasiness
began to show themselves, among the unsophisticated sons and daughters.
White is remarkably fine looking, and very evidently a born gentleman;
the idea of putting us in the same bed was hardly to be tolerated; and
yet, there we were, and but the one bed for us, and that, by the way,
was in the same room occupied by the other