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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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In order to appreciate the sufferings of the negroes sold south, it must be re- membered that all the instinctive affections of that race are peculiarly strong. Their local attachments are very abiding. They are not naturally daring and enter- prising, but home-loving and affectionate. Add to this all the terrors with which ignorance invests the unknown, and add to this, again, that selling to the south is set before the negro from childhood as the last severity of punishment. The threat that terrifies more than whipping or torture of any kind is the threat of being sent down river. We have ourselves heard this feeling expressed by them, and seen the unaffected horror with which they will sit in their gossipping hours and tell fright- ful stories of that “down river,” which to them is “That undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns." A missionary among the fugitives in Canada told us that many of the fugitives confessed themselves to have escaped from comparatively kind masters, and that they were induced to brave the perils of escape, in almost every case, by the des- perate horror with which they regarded being sold south,- a doom which was hanging either over themselves or their husbands, their wives or children. This nerves the African, naturally patient, timid, and unenterprising, with heroic cour- age, and leads him to suffer hunger, cold, pain, the perils of the wilderness, and the more dread penalties of re-capture. |
