Lydia Maria Child, Isaac T. Hopper: a true life

[350] under no moral obligation; because conscience would not allow him to aid in returning a runaway slave to his master. Nevertheless, he and Isaac T. Hopper, and James S. Gibbons, were indicted for ‘feloniously receiving, harboring, aiding and maintaining said Thomas, in order that he might escape from arrest, and avoid conviction and punishment.’ Friend Hopper was advised that he might avail himself of some technical defects in the indictment; but he declined doing it; always insisting that a public investigation was what he wanted.

The trial was carried on in the same spirit that characterized the previous proceedings. A colored man, known to have had dishonest possession of a portion of the lost money, was admitted to testify, on two successive trials, against Barney Corse, who had always sustained a fair character. The District Attorney talked to the jury of ‘the necessity of appeasing the South.’ As if convicting an honest and kind-hearted Quaker of being accomplice in a felony could do anything toward settling the questions that divided North and South on the subject of slavery! One of the jury declared that he never would acquit an abolitionist. Mr. Darg testified of himself during the trial, that he never intended to manumit Thomas, and had made the promise merely as a means of obtaining his money. The newspapers spoke as if the guilt of the accused was not to be