nces, was a
free man who lived in Saratoga and made his living by working about the
hotels, where in the evenings he often played the violin at parties. One
day two men, supposedly managers of a traveling circus company, met him
and offered him good pay if he would go with them as a violinist to
Washington. He consented, and some mornings afterwards awoke to find
himself in a slave pen in the capital. How he got there was ever a
mystery to him, but evidently he had been drugged. He was taken South
and sold to a hard master, with whom he remained twelve years before
he was able to effect his release.[1] In the South any free Negro who
entertained a runaway might himself become a slave; thus in South
Carolina in 1827 a free woman with her three children suffered this
penalty because she gave succor to two homeless and fugitive children
six and nine years old.

[Footnote 1: McDougall: Fugitive Slaves, 36-37.]

Day by day, moreover, from the capital of the nation went on the
internal slave-trade. "When by one means and another a dealer had
gathered twenty or more likely young Negro men and girls, he would bring
them forth from their cells; would huddle the women and young children
into a cart or wagon; would handcuff the men in pairs, the right hand of
one to the left hand of another; make the handcuffs fast to a long chain
which passed between each pair of slaves, and would start his procession
southward."[1] It is not strange that several of the unfortunate people
committed suicide. One distracted mother, about to be separated from her
loved ones, dumbfounded the nation by hurling herself from the window
of a prison in the capital on the Sabbath day and dying in the street
below.

[Footnote 1: McMaster, V, 219-220.]

Meanwhile even in the free states the disabilities of the Negro
continued. In general he was denied the elective franchise, the right of
petition, the right to enter public conveyances or places of amusement,
and he was driven into a status of contempt by being shut out from the
army and the militia. He had to face all sorts of impediments in getting
education or in pursuing honest industry; he had nothing whatever to
do with the administration of justice; and generally he was subject to
insult and outrage.

One might have supposed that on all this proscription and denial of the
ordinary rights of human beings the Christian Church would have taken a
positive stand. Unfortunately, as so often happens, it