This text is part of:
[360]
both mean and wrong to come between master and servant.
‘Such may be thy opinion,’ replied Friend Hopper; ‘but my views of duty differ from thine in this matter.’
Then turning to the woman, he said, ‘By the laws here, thou art free.
No man has a right to make thee a slave again.
Thou mayest stay at the North, or go back to New-Orleans, just as thou choosest.’
The Southerner here interposed to say, ‘Mind what that old gentleman says.
You can go back to New-Orleans, to your husband, if you prefer to go.’
‘But let me tell thee,’ said Friend Hopper to the woman, ‘that if thou stayest here, thou wilt be free; but if they carry thee back, they may sell thee away from thy husband.
Dost thou wish to be free?’
The tears gushed from her eyes in full flood, and she replied earnestly, ‘I do want to be free.
To be sure I do want to be free; but then I want to go to my husband.’
Mr. Morgan and his Southern friend grew excited.
With an angry glance at the old gentleman, the latter exclaimed, ‘I only wish we had you in NewOr-leans!
We'd hang you up in twenty-four hours.’
‘Then you are a set of savages,’ replied Friend Hopper.
‘You are a set of thieves,’ retorted he.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.