as an infant--how often she had been
whipped for leaving her work to nurse me--and how happy I would appear
when she would take me into her arms. When these thoughts came over me,
I would resolve never to leave the land of slavery without my mother. I
thought that to leave her in slavery, after she had undergone and
suffered so much for me, would be proving recreant to the duty which I
owed to her. Besides this, I had three brothers and a sister there,--two
of my brothers having died.

My mother, my brothers Joseph and Millford, and my sister Elizabeth,
belonged to Mr. Isaac Mansfield, formerly from one of the Free States,
(Massachusetts, I believe.) He was a tinner by trade, and carried on a
large manufacturing establishment. Of all my relatives, mother was
first, and sister next. One evening, while visiting them, I made some
allusion to a proposed journey to Canada, and sister took her seat by
my side, and taking my hand in hers, said, with tears in her eyes,--

"Brother, you are not going to leave mother and your dear sister here
without a friend, are you?"

I looked into her face, as the tears coursed swiftly down her cheeks,
and bursting into tears myself, said--

"No, I will never desert you and mother."

She clasped my hand in hers, and said--

"Brother, you have often declared that you would not end your days in
slavery. I see no possible way in which you can escape with us; and now,
brother, you are on a steamboat where there is some chance for you to
escape to a land of liberty. I beseech you not to let us hinder you. If
we cannot get our liberty, we do not wish to be the means of keeping you
from a land of freedom."

I could restrain my feelings no longer, and an outburst of my own
feelings, caused her to cease speaking upon that subject. In opposition
to their wishes, I pledged myself not to leave them in the hand of the
oppressor. I took leave of them, and returned to the boat, and laid down
in my bunk; but "sleep departed from my eyes, and slumber from my
eyelids."

A few weeks after, on our downward passage, the boat took on board, at
Hannibal, a drove of slaves, bound for the New Orleans market. They
numbered from fifty to sixty, consisting of men and women from eighteen
to forty years of age. A drove of slaves on a southern steamboat, bound
for the cotton or sugar regions, is an occurrence so common, that no
one, not even the passengers, appear to notice it, though they clank
their chains at e