The Liberator

From the Christian Register.

SAYRES, ENGLISH AND DRAYTON.

Monstrous statements are made in the papers regarding these sufferers for liberty-sake. When arrested in the endeavor to liberate seventy-seven men, guilty of a skin a little darker than our own, bail was demanded of each at the rate of a thousand dollars for each of the runaway blacks—or over seventy thousand for every one of these fearless emancipators. This seems incredible. Such bail was never before heard of in a decent country, and ought to arouse the whole free heart of the nation to cry, 'Oh God, how long!' One of them is stated to have offered five thousand dollars bail, and to have been refused; and their friends judged it safer for them to stay in jail, as wolves in human shape are prowling around them night and day. It is the crowning grace of this jubilee of slavery, that these men are suffering in the dungeons of a building which the freemen of the North equally own with the oppressors of the South—and that we in New England are to pay our part of their jailors' fees. The Marshal of the District had his application to Congress approved by the Judiciary Committee, for over five thousand dollars expended in securing runaway slaves previous to these. The accusation of a single private man may throw a free man of color into an unwarmed jail, and confine him year after year, and assess the United States a hundred and forty dollars a year for his safe keeping, and our supple tools in Congress will pay the scot without remonstrance. Is it not time that we were done with this partnership in crime? Have we not far less to plead in extenuation than the born slave owners of the South? Have we any apology left save cowardice?