Note (return) — Chapter X

All the while flagrant crimes were committed against Negro women and girls, and free men in the border states were constantly being dragged into slavery by kidnapers. Two typical cases will serve for illustration. George Jones, a respectable man of New York, was in 1836 arrested on Broadway on the pretext that he had committed assault and battery. He refused to go with his captors, for he knew that he had done nothing to warrant such a charge; but he finally yielded on the assurance of his employer that everything possible would be done for him. He was placed in the Bridewell and a few minutes afterwards taken before a magistrate, to whose satisfaction he was proved to be a slave. Thus, in less than two hours after his arrest he was hurried away by the kidnapers, whose word had been accepted as sufficient evidence, and he had not been permitted to secure a single friendly witness. Solomon Northrup, 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.155 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.