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

87 страница из 90

These and similar questions can be most satisfactorily answered by the refugees themselves.

The history of their sufferings and their wrongs, of their bondage and their escape, may excite in some heart hitherto unmoved a glow of sympathy for our colored brother, yet fraudulently deprived of his birthright,–it may furnish the true friends of our country,–the friends of liberty and equal rights,–additional means toward overthrowing the slave power; that scandalous aristocracy which has hitherto been allowed to a great extent to sway the destinies of our nation.

The opinions and views of those who have been held in bondage in the United States may enable us to obtain a clearer insight into the nature of American slavery,–may prompt us to perform more energetically than hitherto, our duties to the oppressor and the oppressed,–to the North and to the South,–to the national government, and to the State in which we dwell.

The writer of these pages intends to visit those Americans who have fled from the North and the South into Upper Canada to escape the oppression exercised upon them by their native countrymen. He will assure them that they have the sympathies of many friends in the United States, and advise them that their good conduct and success in life may have an important bearing on the destinies of millions of their brethren, colored and white, in this country, who have the misfortune to be descended from slave mothers. He will endeavor to collect, with a view to placing their testimony on record, their experiences of the actual workings of slavery–what experience they have had of the condition of liberty–and such statements generally as they may be inclined to make, bearing upon the weighty subjects of oppression and freedom.