who afterwards wrote an account of his experiences, was a free man who lived in Saratoga and made his living by working about the hotels, where in the evenings he often played the violin at parties.  One day two men, supposedly managers of a traveling circus company, met him and offered him good pay if he would go with them as a violinist to Washington.  He consented, and some mornings afterwards awoke to find himself in a slave pen in the capital.  How he got there was ever a mystery to him, but evidently he had been drugged.  He was taken South and sold to a hard master, with whom he remained twelve years before he was able to effect his release.[1] In the South any free Negro who entertained a runaway might himself become a slave; thus in South Carolina in 1827 a free woman with her three children suffered this penalty because she gave succor to two homeless and fugitive children six and nine years old.

[Footnote 1:  McDougall:  Fugitive Slaves, 36-37.]

Day by day, moreover, from the capital of the nation went on the internal slave-trade.  “When by one means and another a dealer had gathered twenty or more likely young Negro men and girls, he would bring them forth from their cells; would huddle the women and young children into a cart or wagon; would handcuff the men in pairs, the right hand of one to the left hand of another; make the handcuffs fast to a long chain which passed between each pair of slaves, and would start his procession southward."[1] It is not strange that several of the unfortunate people committed suicide.  One distracted mother, about to be separated from her loved ones, dumbfounded the nation by hurling herself from the window of a prison in the capital on the Sabbath day and dying in the street below.

[Footnote 1:  McMaster, V, 219-220.]

Meanwhile even in the free states the disabilities of the Negro continued.  In general he was denied the elective franchise, the right of petition, the right to enter public conveyances or places of amusement, and he was driven into a status of contempt by being shut out from the army and the militia.  He had to face all sorts of impediments in getting education or in pursuing honest industry; he had nothing whatever to do with the administration of justice; and generally he was subject to insult and outrage.

One might have supposed that on all this proscription and denial of the ordinary rights of human beings the Christian Church would have taken a positive stand.  Unfortunately, as so often happens, it was on the side of property and vested interest rather than on that of the oppressed.  We have already seen that Southern divines held slaves and countenanced the system; and by 1840 James G. Birney had abundant material for his indictment, “The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery.”  He showed among other things that while in 1780 the Methodist Episcopal Church had opposed slavery and in 1784 had given a slaveholder one month to repent or withdraw from its