Description
"The Kansas Narrative of John Doy of Lawrence, Kansas - A Plain, Unvarnished Tale" - - (Researcher's note: Due to the numerous references to Platte County, only selected excerpts have been indexed.)
Chapter XI, Incidents of The Slave Trade, p. 62-63 - - The handcuffs represented on next page, I still have— they are a pair which I saw broken from the wrists of a young man in the hall. He was quite light in color, and appeared to be very sensitive and wretched. I saw the handcuffs broken between two stones and thrown out of the jail, and when I had an opportunity, told a small boy that was in for sale to fetch them to me before the door was closed, and I would give him a quarter. He did so, and, after we were shut up for the night, I set him to find and bring the man from whom they had been taken. He came, weeping and sobbing, and I asked him why his handcuffs had been broken and not unlocked, as usual.
He said: “When I was sold, after my master had got the $900 dollars, he told the trader to bind me himself, as he would not, and handed him the irons. The trader found me and snapped them on. When we got here he wanted to unfasten them, but had no key, so he broke them off as you saw.”
In answer to further questions, he said: “My master is a preacher, and has been for 15 years, and a class-leader. I used to be one of his class. My mother was his slave, and he is my father.
He sold my mother last week, and now he has sold me, because his wife kept calling him names, and he wanted to have peace in his family, as he said.”
This young man seemed, to have had a pretty good education, which made his case the harder - he was very wretched.
(Researcher's note: In January 1859 abolitionist John Doy agreed to take a group of 13 African American Kansans north to Iowa on one leg of the Underground Railroad. Dr. Doy and his group were then captured 12 miles north of Lawrence by a group of Missouri slave hunters which included Weston Mayor Benjamin Wood. Doy and his 21 year old son, Charles, were transported back to Weston, Missouri and placed in jail. He was later transferred to the Platte City jail and then to the St. Joseph, Missouri, jail. Along the way they were displayed in the streets and hounded, beaten and nearly hanged. He was charged with a federal offense of "slave stealing” and awaited a sentence of hard labor or death. In jail after a second trial that found him guilty, ten men went from Lawrence to St. Joseph in July 1859 and broke Doy out of jail. He returned to Kansas and later wrote a 137-page narrative describing in detail his experiences in Platte County, Missouri.)Date(s) of Creation
1/1/1860
