The Underground Railroad
Captain F. Arrives with Nine Passengers
NAMES OF PASSENGERS.
PETER HEINES, Eatontown, North Carolina; MATTHEW BODAMS, Plymouth, North Carolina; JAMES MORRIS, South End, North Carolina; CHARLES THOMPSON, CHARITY THOMPSON, NATHANIEL BOWSER, and THOMAS COOPER, Portsmouth, Virginia; GEORGE ANDERSON, Elkton, Maryland.
Their arrival was announced by Thomas Garrett as follows:
WILMINGTON, 7th mo., 19th, 1856.
RESPECTED FRIEND, WILLIAM STILL:—I now have the pleasure of consigning to thy care four able-bodied human beings from North Carolina, and five from Virginia, one of which is a girl twelve or thirteen years of age, the rest all men. After thee has seen and conversed with them, thee can determine what is best to be done with them. I am assured they are such as can take good care of themselves. Elijah Pennypacker, some time since, informed me he could find employment in his neighborhood for two or three good hands. I should think that those from Carolina would be about as safe in that neighborhood as any place this side of Canada. Wishing our friends a safe trip, I remain thy sincere friend,
THOS. GARRETT.
After conferring with Harry Craige, we have concluded to send five or six of them tonight in the cars, and the balance, if those go safe, to-morrow night, or in the steam-boat on Second day morning, directed to the Anti-Slavery office.
There was much rejoicing over these select passengers, and very much interesting information was elicited from them.
Peter was only twenty-one years of age, composed of equal parts of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-African blood—rather a model-looking “article,” with a fair share of intelligence. As a slave, he had fared pretty well—he had neither been abused nor stinted of food or clothing, as many others had been. His duties had been to attend upon his master (and reputed father), Elias Heines, Esq., a lawyer by profession in North Carolina.
No charges whatever appear to have been made against Mr. Heines, according to the record book; but Peter seemed filled with great delight at the prospects ahead, as well as with the success that had attended his efforts thus far in striking for freedom.
James was twenty-seven years of age. His experience had been quite different from that of Peter’s. The heel of a woman, by the name of Mrs. Ann McCourt, had been on James’s neck, and she had caused him to suffer severely. As James recounted his grievances, while under the rule, he by no means gave her a very flattering character, but, on the contrary, he plainly stated, that she was a “desperate woman”—that he had “never known any good of her,” and that he was moved to escape to get rid of her. In other words she had threatened to sell him; this well nigh produced frenzy in James’s mind, for too well did he remember, that he had already been sold three times, and in different stages of his bondage had been treated quite cruelly. In the change of masters he was positive in saying, that he had not found a good one,