Description
Served Them Right! Southward Bound. - A gang of 40 negroes, from above (Lexington, Missouri), were taken down the river on the steamer Ben Lewis, lately. These negroes, we understand, had concocted their plans to take passage on the underground railroad that runs through Kansas but their intention having been discovered, it was deemed advisable to send them further South. Lexington (Missouri) Expositor."
Of course, they should be sent South. Ungrateful creatures! To prefer the miseries of Freedom to the delights of the lash and unpaid toil! What!
Concoct a plan to employ the U. G. R. R. (Underground Railroad)! How could chattels be so unmindful of their masters’ rights! And then, just think of it – negroes get up a plan to escape.
Why! Are they not justly doomed to bondage, because they are an inferior race? Don’t they know that their masters, generous souls, take care of them?
Why should they “plan” for liberty? What use is it to them? Don’t they know there are white poor people in the North right along the track of the U. G. R. R.?
And yet these bondmen have the audacity to prefer liberty to slavery!
Oh, yes; send them down to the rice and cotton fields of the far South, where such presumption will be punished with a short life and a speedy passage to a slave’s ignoble grave.
Tear them away from the scenes of youth and the friends and loves of riper years, and commit them to the tender mercies of the overseer’s rawhide and cat-o’-nine-tails.
Didn’t they concoct a plan to flee from their humane and loving masters? Scourge them away to the land of dismal plantations, whence they shall never return! Bold wretches that they were! Prefer freedom to slavery! Chain them up and drag them off!
(Researcher’s note: “Lexington, Missouri, a historic river town in Lafayette County, held one of the largest enslaved populations in the state during the antebellum era. The Lexington Expositor was a local 19th-century newspaper connected to this deeply pro-slavery region, which notably hosted a historic Pro-Slavery Convention on July 13, 1855.”
The Lawrence Republican was a prominent anti-slavery territorial and early statehood newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, launched on May 28, 1857. Edited by T.D. Thacher, the printing office was famously destroyed during Quantrill's Raid on August 21, 1863, before later consolidating into other local publications in 1869.)Date(s) of Creation
4/7/1859
