The Delaware Abolitionist

From the Reflector and Watchman.

SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.

Of all questions which come home to the business and bosoms of all, is the slave trade in this District. The Hon. Henry L. Ellsworth, for many years Commissioner of Patents, and whose fame as a friend of agriculture and the useful arts, is in the houses of our whole country, in a speech delivered by him at Lafayette, Indiana, (his present home,) has stated some facts which must have their weight with the country. Mr. Ellsworth as I have before said was a citizen of Washington, for ten years, he had an opportunity of seeing the operation of slavery in our District, and here is what he says on the subject to the farmers of Indiana :

"A gentleman who once hailed from Virginia has unexpectedly arisen upon the stand, and after admitting with much courtesy the sincerity of my remarks, would lessen their force by calling me a theorist. I am compelled to reply--I am from the Yankee land. I have resided ten long years in a slave territory --the District of Columbia—the little spot the nation emphatically calls her own. Would to God that I could say slavery was not there. But there it is, to greet the arrival of strangers attracted to the metropolis by business or curiosity. Yes, there it is in awful reality,--in full sight of great legislators--near the western gate of the capitol and almost reached by its flag, the 'Pen' is found, walled in and guarded, with manacles and handcuffs, the paraphernalia of a slave ship. There human beings are daily incarcerated and brought out for sale, first exposed and proved, like cattle, sound wind and limb, and then ironed and driven acclimate or die in the rice swamps or on the sugar plantations of the south.

"Here, too, the dignitaries of the land (who travel at eight dollars for every twenty miles,) come to stock their farms.

"Here, too, color is a crime; one speck of African blood consigns the unfortunate if found at large, to the prison, and if as does occur, his passport or manumission is lost, he is sold to slavery again! Those who have purchased their freedom live in constant fear of abduction. I have been awakened at the dead hour of night by the supplication of a domestic, that I would save her sister, whom the men were carrying off. Knowing she was free, I went with a friend in search of the captive: we found her in custody of two 'nigger hunters' who showed an advertisement, $50 bounty; they claimed her as a runaway; she protested by her tears and assertions that she was not a slave. Force was threatened; it would have been resisted at all hazards. A night of horror to this girl passed away. The light of day beamed upon the facts; she was free and proved it. How narrow her escape! —If carried far away her lips sealed in silence, when would her rescue arrive?—at the grave.

"Shall I tell with what horror representatives at our court from foreign lands behold, at the seat of government the exhibition of principles of this free republic, where all men are by nature born equal !

"Even the citizens of the District have not nerve to behold the execution of their wishes. Mothers separated from their children, and the injunction not to put asunder what God has joined together, despised and rejected. Slaves are sent on pretence of business and when beyond the sound of shrieks and supplications, they are seized and borne away to the pen.

"Here it is that fathers sell their own children and themselves rivet the manacles of slavery forever!

"Had wealth been mine I could have consecrated it to a holy purpose. I could have saved some, who had learned to read the Bible and yield to its requirements, giving evidence by a christian walk of the sincerity of profession; such I could have saved, not from servile labor, but from the possession of one whose motive was lust, whose cruelty worse than death! If nature or accomplishments adorn the female slave, it is only to make her the object of greater desire. I have urged the claims of humanity, of pity, and mercy, all in vain."

I well remember the incident to which Col. Ellsworth refers in the foregoing extract, for I was the friend who accompanied him to the house where these "nigger hunters" had rudely entered, and claimed the sister recently returned from "the free West" on a visit to her relatives in this city; nor shall I soon forget the feelings aroused by the impudent menacing demeanor of these men. They interrogated as men having the sovereignty of life and liberty in their hands--"the girl was black, the law said a black face was, by presumption, a slave, and they had a right to her, and could and would imprison her if they pleased;" and that it was deemed by them an act of distinguished courtesy to believe Col. Ellsworth and myself, when we assured them that the girl before them, was well known to us both, and had been for years employed in our families as a seamstress, and was not the fugitive slave they were in pursuit of. And this is the law in the District of Columbia, the free soil of our Confederacy.

ROGER WILLIAMS.