It was thought advisable that I should avoid that
village by taking a roundabout road. That I
did, although it added an extra half to my trip.
The result was that the sun was just peeping over
the eastern hills, as I reached a set of bars showing
an entrance into a pasture lot on one side of the
highway. Removing the bars, I drove into the
field, and passing over a ridge that hid it from
the road, I stopped in front of a log cabin that
had every appearance of being an abandoned and neglected
homestead. That was the station I was looking
for. Arousing my sleeping passengers, I saw
them enter the old domicile, where I bade them good-by,
and received the tearful and repeated thanks of the
youthful slave mother, speaking for herself and her
offspring. I never saw them again, but in due
time the news came back, over what was jocularly
called the ‘grape-vine telegraph,’ that
they had safely reached their destination.
“At the home of the station agent
I was enthusiastically received. That a boy
of eleven should accomplish what I had done was thought
to be quite wonderful. I was given an excellent
breakfast, and then shown to a room with a bed,
where I had a good sleep. On my awakening I
set out on the return journey, this time taking the
most direct route, as I had then no fear of that
hireling constable.
“Subsequently I passed through several
experiences of a similar kind, some of them involving
greater risks and more exciting incidents, but the
recollection of none of them brings me greater satisfaction
than the memory of my first conductorship on the Underground.
“All of which is respectfully submitted
by
“JOHN SMITH.”
COLONIZATION
I have had a good deal to say about Anti-Slavery societies.
There was another society which was called into existence
by the slavery situation. Whether it was pro-slavery
or anti-slavery was a question that long puzzled a
good many people. It was the Colonization Society.
A good many Anti-Slavery people believed in it for
a time and gave it their support. “I am
opposed to slavery, but I am not an Abolitionist:
I am a Colonizationist,” was a declaration that,
when I was a boy, I heard many and many times, and
from the lips of well-intending people.
It did not take the sharp-sighted leaders of the Abolition
movement very long to discover that one of the uses
its managers expected to make of the Colonization
Society was as a shield for slavery. It kept
a number of excellent people from joining in an aggressive
movement against it, took their money, and made them
believe that they were at work for the freedom of
the negro.
Strangely as it might appear, the negroes, who were
assumed to be the beneficiaries of the colonization
scheme, were opposed to it. Quicker than the
white people generally did, they saw through its false
pretense, and, besides, they could not understand why
they should be taken from the land of their nativity,
and sent to the country from which their progenitors
had come, any more than the descendants of Scotch,
English, and German immigrants should be deported to
the lands of their ancestors.
