# The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 59

Contents
The very next morning, by Colter's assistance, kind and zealous to the last, we were on a steamboat bound up the river, in which we reached Pittsburg without accident or adventure. Thence we crossed the mountains to Baltimore, and hastening to New York, took passage in one of the Liverpool packets, feeling no security, night nor day, till the good, blue, deep waier of the ocean at length rolled beneath us; nor indeed hardly then, so long as the significant stripes of the American flag waved above our heads.
When we touched the British shore we felt safe. Thank God, there is a land that impartially shelters fugitives alike from European and from American tyranny — Hungarian exiles and American slaves!
Before leaving New Orleans, Eliza had executed a power of attorney to Mr Colter, — to whom the copy of Mr Curtis's will, intrusted to Montgomery, was delivered, — to proceed under it at law for the recovery of her share of her father's inheritance, with an agreement for an equal division between them of whatever might be got.
Colter encountered all the obstacles which the ractised chicanery of Gilmore could place in his way; but he entered into the contest with great spirit; indeed, it seemed to have for him all the excitement of the games to which he was accustomed. He studied the law himself, the better to push it; and whether or not his experience in his former profession was any help to him in his new one, he presently made himself known as a very shrewd and managing member of the bar. Pursuing Gilmore up and down, through every quirk and turning, to aid in which we sent occasional supplies of money, he finally established the validity of the will, and after a contest of five years, remitted to Eliza her half of the proceeds, having well earned the other half for himself. He ​still continues to enjoy a good practice at the New Orleans bar, and has even been talked of as a candidate for Congress, but is not thought to be southern enough in his opinions.
Mr Grip Curtis's action against Montgomery for assault and battery, after lingering along in the Boston courts for three or four years, at last came on for trial. Mr Agrippa Curtis had retained on his side three or four celebrated Boston lawyers, and the one who closed the case argued, with great energy, that the Union would certainly be dissolved, and society uprooted from its foundations, if the jury did not visit with signal damages such an instance of colored insolence towards a citizen every way so amiable and highly respectable, and such a stanch supporter of the Union, — as Mr Agrippa Curtis. But all this grave, weighty argument, though aided by a most flowing oration, full, as the newspapers had it, of the most brilliant and beautiful tropes and figures from the junior counsel, resulted, much to their disappointment, only in a verdict of twenty-five cents damages, which, with costs to one quarter part of that amount, were duly paid over to Mr Agrippa Curtis's attorney. The jury, by some fortunate accident, happened to be composed of very low people, mechanics and others; there' was only a single wholesale merchant upon it, and he not engaged in the southern trade.
As to Messrs Gilmore and Curtis, they had a fate common with those who get their money over the devil's shoulder. Mr Curtis settled in New Orleans, engaged in great speculations; had at one time the reputation of a millionnaire; but failed, carried down Mr Gilmore with him, and a goodly number of his Boston friends, including the old firm of Curtis, Sawin, Byrne, and Co. The establishment of his brother's will, and the consequent necessity of disgorging, gave him the finishing blow. For several years he lived a disgraced and ruined man, very much under the weather-board. Some of Gilmore's trickeries towards white clients coming to light, — for cheating colored ​people, whether out of their liberty or their property, hurts no man's reputation at New Orleans, — he lost his practice, and sunk pretty much to Mr Grip Curtis's level.
But within a year or two past, since the passage of the new fugitive slave act, by which the American Union has recently been saved from total destruction, these two worthy gentlemen having turned patriots and Union-saviors, have quite recovered themselves. Under the firm of Gilmore and Curtis, — and Mr Colter writes me that it is privately whispered that they have a judge as a secret partner, — they have established themselves at Philadelphia in a general slave catching and kidnapping business. Gilmore has obtained the appointment of a slave catching commissioner for the eastern district of Pennsylvania, and Mr Grip Curtis that of assistant to a deputy marshal, appointed for slave cases exclusively; and, of course, all three, commissioner, catchpole, and judge, play beautifully into each other's hands.
I need only add, that Montgomery follows with profit, at Liverpool, the mercantile pursuits to which he had been educated, and that a family of five beautiful and promising children, of which he and Eliza are the happy parents, does not afford much countenance to the nonsensical physiological theory that the mixed race is hybrid and sterile, under which certain American statesmen are endeavoring to find shelter against the growing inevitable danger by which their favorite system of slavery is threatened. .
In vain, Americans, do you seek to make nature a party to your detestable conspiracy against the rights of humanity, and your own flesh and blood. In vain do your laws proclaim that the children shall follow the condition of the mother. The children of free fathers are not thus to be cheated of their birthright. Day by day, and hour by hour, as the chain becomes weaker, so the disposition and the power to snap it become stronger. Day by day, ​and hour by hour, throughout the civilized world, sympathy diminishes for you, the oppressors, and sympathy increases for your oppressed victims, becoming, as they do, day by day, not by a figure of speech, merely, or by a pedigree derived from Adam, but as a matter of notorious and contemporary fact, more and more your brethren, flesh of your flesh, and blood of your blood.
Can you stand the finger of scorn pointed at you by all the civilized world?
Can you stand the still, small voice of conscience, day by day, and hour by hour, reëchoing in your own hearts those uncomfortable epithets — slave driver, slave breeder, slave hunter, dough face?
As to you, graybeards in iniquity, with hearts seared, faith blighted, hope withered, and love dried up, continue, if you will, you and your Aaron, to bow down to the golden calf that first seduced you!
It is your sin, your weakness, your want of faith, that have kept your nation wandering this forty years in the wilderness. With imaginations too dull and gross to raise you to the height of any mental Mount Pisgah; incapable to see, even in your mind's eye, the distant prospect of good things to come; longing secretly in your hearts to return to the fleshpots of Egypt; well content to make bricks for the Pharaohs; yourselves slaves hardly less than those whom you oppress; cowardly souls, frightened by tales of giants and lions, it were vain to expect that you should ever enter the promised land; cravens, fit only to die and to rot in the wilderness!
But already is coming forward a new generation, to whom justice will be something more than a mere empty sound; something as imperiously forced upon them by their own sense of right, as by the clamors and demands of those who suffer. In vain do your priests and your politicians labor to extinguish, in the minds of the rising generation, the idea of any Law higher than their own wicked bargains and disgraceful enactments. When to uphold slavery ​it becomes necessary to preach atheism, we may be certain that the day of its downfall is nigh. This must surely be the darkness which precedes the cot for what greater darkness than this is possible!
To you, then, uncontaminated children, I appeal; and in mine speak the cries of millions. That which hath been hidden from the wise and the prudent, the voice of love and mercy shall reveal unto you.
Love and mercy, did I say? There hardly needs that; a decent self-respect, a regard for yourselves only, might suffice.
The whip flourishes also over your heads. The white slaves in America are far more numerous than the black ones; not white slaves such as I was, pronounced so by the law, but white slaves such as you are, made such by a base hereditary servility, which, methinks, it is time to shake off.
The question is raised, and can be blinked no longer: Shall America be what the fathers and founders of her independence wished and hoped — a free democracy, based upon the foundation of human rights, or shall she degenerate into a miserable republic of Algerines, domineered over by a little selfconstituted autocracy of slaveholding lynchers and blackguards, utterly disregardful of all law, except their own will and pleasure?
Yes, my young friends, it is to this destiny that you are called. Upon you the decision of this question — no longer to be staved off by any political temporizing — is devolved. Those who would be free themselves — so it now plainly appears — cannot safely be parties to any scheme of oppression. The dead and the living cannot be chained together. Those chains which you have helped to rivet on the limbs of others, you now find, have imperceptibly been twined about yourselves; and drawn so tightly, too, that even your hearts are no longer to beat freely.
Take courage, then, and do as I did. Throw off ​the chains! And stop not there;-others are also to be freed. It seems a doubtful thing; but courage, trust, and perseverance, proof against delay and disappointment, faith and hope, will do it. I am old, and may not live to see it; but my five grandchildren, born, thank God, in free England, surely will.