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parting, and said, ‘I am thankful for the privilege of having seen you. I never talked with an abolitionist before.
You have convinced me that slaveholding is sinful in the sight of God.
My husband left me several slaves, and I have held them for five years; but when I return, I am resolved to hold a slave no longer.’
Friend Hopper cherished some hope that this preaching and praying slaveholder would eventually manumit his bondmen; but I had listened to his conversation, and I thought otherwise.
His conscience seemed to me to be asleep under a seven-fold shield of self-satisfied piety; and I have observed that such consciences rarely waken.
At the time of the Christiana riots, in 1851, when the slave-power seemed to overshadow everything, and none but the boldest ventured to speak against it, Friend Hopper wrote an article for the Tribune, and signed it with his name, in which he maintained that the colored people, ‘who defended themselves and their firesides against the lawless assaults of an armed party of negro-hunters from Maryland,’ ought not to be regarded as traitors or murderers ‘by men who set a just value on liberty, and who had no conscientious scruples with regard to war.’
The first runaway, who was endangered by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, happened to be placed under his protection.
A very goodlooking
Boston, J. P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington; London; Low and Company, 1854.
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