re, as well as
to pass the days there. As it was merely for the non-payment of a sum of
money that I was held, I thought I had a right to be treated as a
debtor. But those apartments were so insecure, that the keepers did not
care to trust me there during the night.

By this change of quarters my condition was a good deal improved. I not
only had ample conveniences for reading, but I improved the opportunity
to learn to write, having only been able to sign my name when T was
committed to the prison.

But a jail, after all, is a jail; and I longed and sighed to obtain my
liberty, and to enjoy again the society of my wife and children. Had it
been wished to impress my mind in the strongest manner with the horrors
of slavery, no better method could have been devised than this
imprisonment in the Washington jail. I felt personally what it was to be
restrained of my liberty; and, as many of the prisoners were runaway
slaves, or slaves committed at the request of their masters, I saw a
good deal of what slaves are exposed to. Of this I shall here give but a
single instance. Wallace, the marshal, as I have already mentioned, had
two female slaves, the last remnants of the large slave-property which
he had inherited from his father. One of these was a young and very
comely mulatto girl, whom Wallace had made his housekeeper, and whom he
sought to make also his concubine. But, as the girl already had a child
by a young white man, to whom she was attached, she steadily repelled
all his advances. Not succeeding by persuasion, this scion of the
aristocracy of the Old Dominion--this Virginian gentleman, and marshal
of the United States for the District of Columbia--shut the girl up in
the jail of the District, in hopes of thus breaking her to his will;
and, as she proved obstinate, he finally sold her. He then turned his
eyes on the other woman,--his property,--Jemima, our cook, already the
mother of three children. But she set him at open defiance. As she
wished to be sold, he had lost the greatest means of controlling her;
and as she openly threatened, before all the keepers, to tear every rag
of clothing off his body if he dared lay his hand upon her, he did not
venture, to brave her fury.

In most of the states, if not in all of them, certainly in all the free
states, there is no such thing as keeping a man in prison for life
merely for the non-payment of a fine which he has no means to pay. The
same spirit of humanity which