his property, and your country with
it? I think not."

Mr. Jefferson endeavored to dissuade the young man from his project of
removal. Mr. Coles, however, was not to be convinced. After serving for
six years as private secretary, and fulfilling a special diplomatic
mission to Russia, he withdrew to his ancestral home in Virginia, and
prepared to lead forth his slaves to the State of Illinois, then
recently admitted into the Union, but still a scarcely broken expanse of
virgin prairie. He could not lawfully emancipate his slaves in Virginia,
and it was far from his purpose to turn them loose in the wilderness. He
was going with them, and to stay with them until they were well rooted
in the new soil.

All his friends and relations opposed his scheme; nor had he even the
approval of the slaves themselves, for they knew nothing whatever of his
intention. He had been a good master, and they followed him with blind
faith, supposing that he was merely going to remove, as they had seen
other planters remove, from an exhausted soil to virgin lands. Placing
his slaves in the charge of one of their number, a mulatto man who had
already made the journey to Illinois with his master, he started them in
wagons on their long journey in April, 1819, over the Alleghany
Mountains to a point on the Monongahela River. There he bought two large
flat-bottomed boats, upon which he embarked his whole company, with
their horses, wagons, baggage, and implements. His pilot proving a
drunkard, he was obliged to take the command himself, upon reaching
Pittsburg.

The morning after he left Pittsburg, a lovely April day, he called all
the negroes together on the deck of the boats, which were lashed
together, and explained what he was going to do with them. He told them
they were no longer slaves, but free people, free as he was, free to go
on down the river with him, and free to go ashore, just as they pleased.
He afterwards described the scene. "The effect on them," he wrote, "was
electrical. They stared at me and at each other, as if doubting the
accuracy or reality of what they heard. In breathless silence they stood
before me, unable to utter a word, but with countenances beaming with
expression which no words could convey, and which no language can now
describe. As they began to see the truth of what they had heard, and to
realize their situation, there came on a kind of hysterical, giggling
laugh. After a pause of intense and unutterable emot