VOICES OF THE TRUE HEARTED.

No. 5.

THE SLAVE MARKET AT WASHINGTON.

BY JOHN G. WHITTIER.

I find, in a late number of the Albany Patriot, a letter from a gentleman in the city of Washington, addressed to the editor, from which I take the following paragraphs:

"This year, over five thousand slaves have already been sold in our dens of diabolism, and many more heart strings will be broken before the winter sets in, by sundering all the ties of life, to meet the demand of human victims in the Louisiana market. In Florida, also, the demand has been increased, by the diabolical law to encourage the armed settlement' of that slaverycursed territory, and thus increase the political weight of the slave system in the councils of the country.

had come to the city in a vessel, and had been seized and imprisoned on suspicion of being a slave. As he happened to have no document to prove his freedom, after having been kept in close confinement in a prison cell for six months, he was in a few days to be sold as a slave, to pay the fees of the jailor!

We visited, the next day, a slave holder's establishment in the city of Washington. It stood somewhat apart from the dense part of the city, yet in full view of the capitol. Its dark, strong walls rose in dim contrast with the green beauty of early summer-a horror and an abomination—a blot upon the fair and pleasant landscape. We looked in upon a group of human beings herded together like cattle "Scenes have taken place in Washington, this sum-formed us that there were five or six other regular for the market. The young man in attendance inmer, that would make the devil blush through the darkness of the pit, if he had been caught in them. A slave dealers in the city, who, having no prisons of fortnight ago last Tuesday, no less than SIXTY HU-their own, kept their slaves in this establishment, MAN BEINGS were carried right by the capitol yard to a slave ship! The men were chained in couples, and fastened to a log chain, as it is common in this region. The women walked by their side. The little children were carried along in wagons."

In the summer of 1840, when in Washington, I took occasion, in company with two friends, to visit the principal slave-trading establishments of the district. In Alexandria, at a great slave prison formerly known as Franklin & Armfield's, there were about fifty slaves. They were enclosed by high, strong walls, with grated iron doors. Among them was a poor woman who had escaped, twelve years before, from slavery, and who had married a free man. She had been hunted out by some of those human blood-hounds, who are in the detestable occupation of slave-catchers, separated from her husband, and, with her child, had been sold to the spec

or in the CITY PRISON. The following advertisement of this infernal market house, I have copied from the Washington Globe and the Intelligencer :

" CASH PAID FOR NEGROES."

"The subscriber wishes to purchase a number of neToes for the Louisiana and Mississippi markets. He Himself or agent, at all times, can be found at his will pay the highest price which the market will justify. JAIL, on Seventh street, the first house south of the market bridge, on the west side. Letters addressed to him will receive the earliest attention.

WILLIAM H. WILLIAMS."

In the same papers, four other regular dealers in human beings advertised themselves. In addition, George Kephart, of Alexandria, advertised the "copper fastened brig, Isaac Franklin." It was nearly

ready to sail with slaves for New Orleans. So much for the national newspaper organs of the whig and democratic parties! What must be the state of parties which can acknowledge such papers as their mouth pieces.

ulators for the New Orleans market. Another woman, whose looks and manner were expressive of deep anguish, had, with her nine children, been sold away from her husband-an everlasting separation! But her sorrows had but just begun. Long ere this, she and her children have probably been re-sold, On the wall of the slave dealer's office were susscattered and divided, and are now toiling in hope-pended some low and disgraceful pictures and caricaless bereavement, or buried like brutes, without a tures, in which the abolitionists and blacks were tear or Christian rite, on the banks of the Missis-represented, and in which Daniel O'Connell and John sippi.

Q. Adams held a prominent position, as objects for the obscene jokes and witticism of the scoundrel traffickers. For one, I regard it as an honorable testimony to the faithfulness and heroism of these great and good men, in their advocacy of human freedom. At the Alexandria public jail was a poor lad who The time is, I trust, not far distant, when those very

From this horrible MARKET HOUSE of HUMAN FLESH, we were informed that from fifteen hundred to two thousand slaves are sometimes sent to the South in a single year.

pictures shall cause the knees of the base pirates wonderfully endowed, the fact that they have emwho congregate in the den of iniquity, to smite to-ployed their talents in upholding a system which gether.

crushes and kills the minds of millions. But here in the slave prison, I saw them in another light.— The fascinations of genius, which, like the silver veil of the Eastern Prophet, had covered them, fell off, and left only the deformity of tyranny. I looked upon the one as the high priest of slavery, ministering at its altar, and scowling defiance to the religion and philanthropy of christendom-the fitting champion of that southern democracy, whose appropriate emblem is the SLAVE-WHIP, with the negro at one end, and an overseer at the other. And with God's immortal children, converted into mer

Known to God only, is the dreadful amount of human agony and suffering, which, from this slave-jail, has sent its cry, unheard or unheeded of man, up to His ear. The mother weeping for her child-the wife separated from her husband, breaking the night silence with the shriek of breaking hearts! Now and then an appalling fact shed light upon the secret horrors of the prison house. In the winter of 1838, a poor colored man, overcome with horror at being sold to the South, put an end to his life by cutting his throat. From the private establishment we next proceed-chandize, I thought of Henry Clay's declaration : ed to the old city prison-built by the people of the United States-the common property of the nation. It is a damp, dark, loathsome building. We passed between two ranges of small stone cells, filled with blacks. We noticed five or six in a single cell which seemed scarcely large enough for a solitary tenant. The heat was suffocating. In rainy weather, the keeper told us that the prison was uncomfortably | wet. In winter, there could be no fire in these cells. The keeper, with some reluctance, admitted that he received slaves from the traders, and kept them until they were sold, at thirty-four cents per day. Men of the North! it was your money which helped pile the granite of these cells, and forge the massy iron doors, for the benefit of slave traders! It is your property which is thus perverted!

"That is property which the law makes property," and that "two hundred years had sanctioned and sanctified slavery." . . . . . I saw the intimate and complete connection between the planter who raises the slave for market, the dealer who buys him, the legislator who sustains and legalizes the traffic, and the northern freemen, who by his vote places that legislator in power. In the silence of my soul, I pledged myself anew to liberty; and felt at that moment the baptism of a new life-long consecration to the cause. God helping me, the resolution which I then formed, shall be fulfilled to the uttermost!

I left that prison with mingled feelings of shame, sorrow, and indignation. Before me was the great dome of the capitol; our national representatives But to me this prison had a painful and peculiar were passing and re-passing on the marble stairsinterest. It was here that Dr. Crandall, of New over all, the stripes and stars fluttered in the breeze York, was confined for several months. His health which swept down the Potomac. I was thus comwas completely broken down, and he was released pelled to realize the fact, that the abominations I had only to find a grave. Do you ask what was his looked upon, were in the District of Columbia-the crime? He had circulated among some members of chosen home of our republic-the hearthstone of our his profession, at Washington, a copy of a pamphlet national honor-that the representatives of the nawritten by myself, on the subject of slavery, and in tions of Europe here looked, at one and the same favor of freedom! Here in darkness, dampness, and glance, upon the capitol and the slave jail. Not long silence, his warm, generous heart died within before, a friend had placed in my hand, a letter from him. And this was in Washington-in the metro-Seidensticker, one of the leaders of the patriotic polis of our free country-in the nineteenth cen- movement in behalf of German liberty in 1831. It tury.

was written from the prison of Celle, where he has been for eleven years a living martyr to the cause of freedom. In this letter, the noble German expresses his indignant astonishment at the speeches of Calhoun and others in Congress on the subject of slavery, and deplores the sad influence which our slave system is exerting upon the freedom of Eu

Scarcely an hour before my visit to the prison, I had been in the senate chamber of the United States. I had seen the firm lip, the broad, full brow, and beaming eye of Calhoun, the stern repose of a face written over with thought, and irradiated with the deep, still fires of genius. I had conversed with Henry Clay, once the object of my boyish enthusi-rope. I could thus estimate in some degree the asm, and encountered the fascination of his smile, and winning voice, as he playfully reproached me for deserting an old friend. I had there, in spite of my knowledge of its gross perversion to the support of wrong, felt something of that respect and reverence which is always extorted by intellectual power. For the moment I half forgot, in my appreciations of the gifts of genius with which these men have been so

blighting effects of our union of liberty and slavery, upon the cause of political reform in the old world, strengthening the hands of the Peels and Metternichs, and deepening around the martyrs and confessors of European] freedom the cold shadow of their prisons. All that I had said or done for the cause of emancipation heretofore, seemed cold and trifling at that moment, and even now, when I am