Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Summary
I know it may be said that the slave in this country is not stolen: that it is a purchase, a fair business transaction. But who is the owner of this man thus sold and purchased? None other, most certainly, than himself…It is the stealing of a man from himself.
Henry Peterson, Junior Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia, 1838William Grose, a twenty-five-year-old fugitive slave, stole his body back from his southern master and arrived nearly destitute in Ontario in 1851. During a perilous journey that commenced in New Orleans, Grose risked his life and suffered a tremendous ordeal in order to live in freedom, especially psychologically, as he struggled along the way with “many doubts” about his chances of successfully escaping the institution of bondage. Smuggled on board canal boats and traversing vast distances on foot, Grose was plagued by the nightmare of being caught and sent back. Indeed, the entire time he “felt a dread – a heavy load on me all the way.” He preferred even death to reenslavement. Relating his story to interviewer Benjamin Drew five years later in St. Catherines, he recalled: “I said to myself – I recollect it well, – I can’t die but once; if they catch me, they can but kill me.” When he finally arrived in the North, his initial intention was to remain in the United States, but he “saw so many mean-looking men,” that he “did not dare to stay.” He eventually found a friend “who helped me on the way to Canada,” where he placed his valuable body out of reach of the Fugitive Slave Law and recapture.
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- Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South , pp. 254 - 260Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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