About a half hour before night they were commanded to stop work, take a bite to eat, and then be locked up in a small cell until the next morning after sunrise.  The prisoners were locked in, two together.  My bed was a cold stone floor with but little bedding!  My visitors were bed-bugs and musquitoes.

CHAPTER VIII.

Character of my prison companions.—­Jail breaking contemplated.—­Defeat of our plan.—­My wife and child removed.—­Disgraceful proposal to her, and cruel punishment.—­Our departure in a coffle for New Orleans.—­Events of our journey.

Most of the inmates of this prison I have described, were white men who had been sentenced there by the law, for depredations committed by them.  There was in that prison, gamblers, drunkards, thieves, robbers, adulterers, and even murderers.  There were also in the female department, harlots, pick-pockets, and adulteresses.  In such company, and under such influences, where there was constant swearing, lying, cheating, and stealing, it was almost impossible for a virtuous person to avoid pollution, or to maintain their virtue.  No place or places in this country can be better calculated to inculcate vice of every kind than a Southern work house or house of correction.

After a profligate, thief, or a robber, has learned all that they can out of the prison, they might go in one of those prisons and learn something more—­they might properly be called robber colleges; and if slaveholders understood this they would never let their slaves enter them.  No man would give much for a slave who had been kept long in one of these prisons.

I have often heard them telling each other how they robbed houses, and persons on the high way, by knocking them down, and would rob them, pick their pockets, and leave them half dead.  Others would tell of stealing horses, cattle, sheep, and slaves; and when they would be sometimes apprehended, by the aid of their friends, they would break jail.  But they could most generally find enough to swear them clear of any kind of villany.  They seemed to take great delight in telling of their exploits in robbery.  There was a regular combination of them who had determined to resist law, wherever they went, to carry out their purposes.

In conversing with myself, they learned that I was notorious for running away, and professed sympathy for me.  They thought that I might yet get to Canada, and be free, and suggested a plan by which I might accomplish it; and one way was, to learn to read and write, so that I might write myself a pass ticket, to go just where I pleased, when I was taken out of the prison; and they taught me secretly all they could while in the prison.

But there was another plan which they suggested to me to get away from slavery; that was to break out of the prison and leave my family.  I consented to engage in this plot, but not to leave my family.