grim visage of slavery can assume
no smiles which can fascinate the partially enlightened slave, into a
forgetfulness of his bondage, nor of the desirableness of liberty.

I was not through the first month of this, my second year with the kind
and gentlemanly Mr. Freeland, before I was earnestly considering and
advising plans for gaining that freedom, which,{211} when I was but
a mere child, I had ascertained to be the natural and inborn right of
every member of the human family. The desire for this freedom had been
benumbed, while I was under the brutalizing dominion of Covey; and
it had been postponed, and rendered inoperative, by my truly pleasant
Sunday school engagements with my friends, during the year 1835, at Mr.
Freeland's. It had, however, never entirely subsided. I hated slavery,
always, and the desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze, to
fan it into a blaze, at any moment. The thought of only being a creature
of the _present_ and the _past_, troubled me, and I longed to have a
_future_--a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past
and present, is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul--whose
life and happiness is unceasing progress--what the prison is to the
body; a blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this,
another year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into
life my latent, but long cherished aspirations for freedom. I was now
not only ashamed to be contented in slavery, but ashamed to _seem_ to be
contented, and in my present favorable condition, under the mild rule
of Mr. F., I am not sure that some kind reader will not condemn me for
being over ambitious, and greatly wanting in proper humility, when I say
the truth, that I now drove from me all thoughts of making the best of
my lot, and welcomed only such thoughts as led me away from the house
of bondage. The intense desires, now felt, _to be free_, quickened by my
present favorable circumstances, brought me to the determination to act,
as well as to think and speak. Accordingly, at the beginning of this
year 1836, I took upon me a solemn vow, that the year which had now
dawned upon me should not close, without witnessing an earnest attempt,
on my part, to gain my liberty. This vow only bound me to make my escape
individually; but the year spent with Mr. Freeland had attached me, as
with "hooks of steel," to my brother slaves. The most affectionate and
confiding friendship existed between