An Escaped Slave Speaks His Mind

Some slaves spoke of their masters with affection and claimed they had never been abused. They might, however, have been playing a role in order to get favors or to survive, while keeping their inner selves hidden. That was true of J. W. Loguen, one of many thousands of slaves who ran away and escaped to the North.

Loguen was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1813. His mother, Cherry, was a slave. His father was a slave owner. As a young man Loguen tried several times to escape slavery. At the age of twenty-one he succeeded and made his way to Canada. In 1860 Loguen received a letter from his former master’s wife.

“You know that we reared you as we reared our own children,” she wrote, “that you was never abused, and that shortly before you ran away, when your master asked you if you would like to be sold, you said you would not leave him to go with any body.” She demanded a thousand dollars from Loguen as repayment for the property he had stolen from her—property that was his body.

Loguen’s answering letter included these passionate words:

Wretched woman! Be it known to you that I value my freedom, to say nothing of my mother, brothers and sisters, more than your whole body; more, indeed, than my own life; more than all the lives of all the slaveholders and tyrants under Heaven.

You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1,000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, “You know we raised you as we did our own children.” Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping-post? Did you raise them to be drove off in a coffle in chains? Where are my poor bleeding brothers and sisters? Can you tell? Who was it that sent them off into sugar and cotton fields, to be kicked, and cuffed, and whipped, and to groan and die; and where no kin can hear their groans, or attend and sympathize at their dying bed, or follow in their funeral? Wretched woman! Do you say you did not do it? Then I reply, your husband did, and you approved the deed—and the very letter you sent shows me that your heart approves it all. Shame on you.

Loguen settled in New York State and made good use of his freedom. He learned to read, opened several schools for black children, and became an abolitionist. In the years before the Civil War, Loguen turned his home in Syracuse, New York, into a stop on the Underground Railroad, the network of shelters for escaped slaves making their way to freedom.