nion, and I entirely agreed with him, that if the
object was to obtain my discharge from prison, that object was to be
accomplished, not by agitating the matter in the senate, but by private
appeals to the equity and the conscience of the President; nor did he
think, nor I either, that my interests ought to be sacrificed for the
opportunity to make an anti-slavery speech. There is reason in
everything; and I thought, and he thought too, that I had been made
enough of a martyr of already.

The case having been brought to the notice of the President, he, being
no longer a candidate for reelection, could not fail to recognize the
claim of Sayres and myself to a discharge. We had already been kept in
jail upwards of four years, for an offence which the laws had intended
to punish by a trifling pecuniary fine Nor was this all. The earlier
part of our confinement had been exceedingly rigorous, and it had only
been by the untiring efforts of our friends, and at a great expense to
them, that we had been saved from falling victims to the conspiracy,
between the District Attorney and Judge Crawford, to send us to the
penitentiary. Although my able and indefatigable counsel, Mr. Mann,
whose arduous labors and efforts in my behalf I shall never forget, and
still less his friendly counsels and kind personal attentions, had
received nothing, except, I believe, the partial reimbursement of his
travelling expenses, and although there was much other service
gratuitously rendered in our cases, yet it had been necessary to pay
pretty roundly for the services of Mr. Carlisle; and, altogether, the
expenditures which had been incurred to shield us from the effects of
the conspiracy above mentioned far exceeded any amount of fine which
might have been reasonably imposed under the indictments upon which we
had been found guilty. Was not the enormous sum which Judge Crawford
sentenced us to pay a gross violation of the provision in the
constitution of the United States against excessive fines? Any fine
utterly beyond a man's ability to pay, and which operates to keep him a
prisoner for life, must be excessive, or else that word has no meaning.

But, though our case was a strong one, there still remained a serious
obstacle in the way, in the idea that, because half the fines was to go
to the owners of the slaves, the President could not remit that half.
Here was a point upon which Mr. Sumner was able to assist us much more
effectually than by m