Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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But before you render assistance, you should know “whom you are helping and for what reason he has fled.” Perhaps he is running away to get rid of a scolding wife,–or he may be an ungrateful man,–nay, he may be a thief or a murderer.

And where am I to go for information on these points? To his pursuers? They will not tell me the truth. Patrick Snead, a fugitive from Savannah, as white as nine tenths of the men of the north, and not therefore “a fugitive black man,” was arrested on a false charge of murder. Sims and Burns, both “black men,” were kidnapped in Boston on charges of theft. By taking the word of a pursuer, I may “plunge a shipmate into the jaws of a shark.” Proceedings are “summary,”–and by the time I could obtain reliable intelligence, the fugitive might become the victim of an incensed tyrant, whose malice is protected by written atrocities denominated laws. In any particular case, the probabilities are, that the fugitive slave is an innocent man,–a wronged and suffering brother, to hear whose prayer it would be perilous for a Christian to refuse. But if, in one case out of a thousand, it should subsequently appear, that he had committed larceny, or had even “killed an Egyptian,”–it might quiet our consciences to reflect that in judging of a slave’s guilt, allowances ought to be made for the peculiar privations and wrongs, incident to a slave’s life, and on the score of the abject ignorance, to which he has been condemned by an unjust law,–that if the same crime had been perpetrated by a white man, in order to effect his escape from wrongful captivity among Patagonians or Arabs, he would be acquitted both in conscience and law,– and that it were better to aid ten, nay, ten thousand poor, unenlightened, uninstructed creatures to escape hanging, than to incur the tremendous responsibility of consigning an innocent man to a doom worse than death itself.