# The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 47

Contents
Shortly after arriving at Charleston, which I reached without any further adventure worthy of note, I waited upon the mercantile gentlemen to whom I had letters of credit. Upon entering the counting room, I found another stranger there, whom, ​from his bearing and appearance, I recognized at once as the master of some merchant ship. He was speaking with great vehemence, and apparently complaining of some injury.
I gathered from what he said, that his vessel belonged to Boston, in the state of Massachusetts, and that, having encountered a severe storm while on a voyage to the Havana, he had been obliged to put into Charleston to refit. Not only was his cook a colored man, but of the eight sailors, by whom the brig was manned, no less than five were colored, all, as the captain said, natives of Massachusetts, born on Cape Cod, and as able seamen as ever trod a deck.
These colored men — so the captain was complaining in pretty hard terms — had just been taken out of his ship and carried off to jail; and he wished to know of the Charleston merchants, who, it seemed, were the correspondents of his owners, whether there was no security against this outrage, as inconvenient to him as it was injurious to the men.
"Why," said the merchant to whom he addressed himself, with a significant glance at his partner, and a mischievous sort of a look at the captain, "there has just arrived here, I understand, a commissioner from Massachusetts, appointed by the governor of that state, under a resolve of the legislature, to bring this very question of the imprisonment of colored seamen of that state to a legal issue. The commissioner is staying at such a hotel," naming the very one at which I had put up; "that is, unless he has been turned away, for notice has already been issued to all the hotel keepers not to harbor him. You had better apply to him, and quick too, or you may not find him. He is the very man for you, and yours is the very case for him. Try and see what he. and the United States laws, and the state of Massachusetts, will do for you."
The ironical, sneering tone in which this was said was evident enough to me; but the honest sea captain to whom it was addressed seemed to take it all ​in good earnest, and hastily started off in pursuit of the commissioner.
Having arranged my business matters with these merchants, and provided for meeting such drafts -as might be made on behalf of my North Carolina protégé, I ventured to inquire whether the arrest of which I had just heard the captain complaining was really made under any law.
"O, yes, certainly," was the answer. "All negroes and colored people, who arrive here on shipboard, are taken at once to jail, and kept there till the ship is ready to depart, when, by paying their board, jail fees, and other costs, they are allowed to go in her."
"And suppose they can't pay," said I.
"O, the captain, you know, must have his men, and he pays for them."
"But suppose the captain does not choose to pay."
Why, in that case, the fees are raised by selling the men at auction."
"Sell free men at auction," said I, "driven into our ports by stress of weather,and imprisoned merely for not being white!"
There was something in the tone in which I spoke that brought a slight tinge of color into the merchant's cheek. He endeavored to apologize for this law by suggesting the great danger of insurrection, if free colored men, from the north or elsewhere, should be permitted to come in contact with a slave population far exceeding the whites in numbers, as was the case in Charleston and the neighborhood.
"But what is it' I asked, "about this Massachusetts commissioner, to whom you referred the captain?"
"Why," said the merchant, with a contemptuous sort of a smile, "the Boston ship owners, finding these prison fees and expenses a charge upon their ships, have all at once been seized with a mighty strong sympathy for negroes' rights, — if you want to ​stir a Boston man up, just touch him in the pocket, — and so they have got this commissioner sent on here to try this question in the courts. They pretend that South Carolina has no right to make a law for the imprisonment of free persons from Massachusetts, not charged with any crime, but merely from a general suspicion on account of their color."
"And when is the case likely to come to trial?" I asked.
"Come to trial!" said the Carolina merchant, rolling up the whites of his eyes; "and do you suppose we are going to allow the case to be tried?"
"And why not?" I asked; "and how can you help it?"
"Ten to one," he answered, "the cause, if tried, would go against us. The law in question has already been pronounced unconstitutional by one of the United States judges, and he too a South Carolina man. But whether unconstitutional or not, we think it necessary, and the niggers and the Yankee merchants must learn to put up with it. As to helping it, that is a very simple matter. The commissioner from Massachusetts has already had notice to take himself off, and all the hotel keepers, as I mentioned to the captain, not to entertain him at their peril. We shan't tolerate any such abolitionist spies and conspirators here in Charleston. In fact, if the old gentleman had not had the Yankee shrewdness to bring a daughter of his along with him by way of protector, he might before this time have found himself tumbled out of the city, neck and heels, comfortably dressed in a coat of tar and feathers. There is not a lawyer here who would dare bring a suit for him. Most of our merchants are northern men, — I am one myself, said my informant, — "but we are all Carolinians in feeling; in fact, if we expect to live here, we have to be so, and I shall be on hand to do my part, and if the old gentleman hesitates about it, to help him in finding his way out of the city. The matter has been settled at a public meeting. ​He is not to be allowed to sleep here another night."
"And what do you imagine the state of Massachusetts and the Boston merchants will say at being so unceremoniously kicked out of the court house doorway?"
"O, as to the merchants, they will probably do like a well-bred Carolina negro, who takes off his hat when he gets a kick for his insolence, and grins out, with a low bow, a "Thank ye, master" Kicking agrees quite as well with Yankee merchants as with niggers. And both niggers and merchants are quite used to it! As to the state of Massachusetts, so long as that state continues to be controlled, as at present, by the mercantile and manufacturing influence, there is no danger of any trouble from her. She will pocket the insult very quietly. The political leaders in Massachusetts, of both parties, are exceedingly anxious to hire themselves out as negro drivers to the south. What would become of Boston or Massachusetts without the southern trade? As the poor Yankees live on the crumbs which fall from our table, they are not to be particular about the terms on which they are allowed to pick them up. Of course, if they are allowed to pick up the crumbs, they must expect now and then to eat a little dirt."
My Carolina acquaintance seemed to make a rather low estimate of the spirit of Massachusetts; yet when I recollected what I had myself seen and heard in passing through Boston a few weeks before, I could not but admit that this calculation upon mercantile servility and cupidity was a pretty safe one.
As I reached the hotel, on my return from the merchant's, I found a great crowd collected in the streets. A carriage stood at the door, and presently, a tall, white-haired old gentleman appeared, with a lady leaning on his arm, very ceremoniously attended by half a dozen gentlemen, in white kid gloves, whom I afterwards understood to be a detachment of the vigilance committee, specially appointed to escort the ​Massachusetts commissioner out of the city. The commissioner and his daughter were placed in the carriage, which drove off amid the shouts, jeers, and execrations of the assembled multitude; and so far as I have heard, this is the last that Massachusetts has ever done towards vindicating the rights of her imprisoned seamen.
English seamen, as I have been told, sometimes suffer under the same law. If such are the facts, Great Britain will no doubt find the means of bringing these insolent slaveholders to reason; and perhaps, through her agency, the timid and trembling northern states may sooner or later regain a free entry into the port of Charleston. It would indeed be a curious circumstance if British aid and interference should be found the only means of securing to the northern merchants and seamen, as against the domineering insolence of their southern masters, their rights under the constitution of the United States. Such an interference on behalf of humanity and sailors' rights might almost pass as an offset to the wrongs formerly inflicted by Great Britain in the impressment of American seamen.