s, of course, deemed a great piece of insolence in a
bondman, and he was punished by being sold to a speculator, carried off
hand-cuffed, with his feet tied under the horse's belly, and finally
shipped for Louisiana with a coffle of five hundred slaves. He was
bought by a gambler, who took him to Louisville, Kentucky. When he had
lived there three years, his master, having lost large sums of money,
told him he should be obliged to sell him. Thomas had meanwhile
ascertained that his father had removed to Kentucky, and was still a
very wealthy man. He obtained permission to go and see him, with the
hope that he would purchase him and set him free. Accordingly, he
called upon him, and told him that he was Thomas, the son of his slave
Rachel, who had always assured him that he was his father. The rich
planter did not deny poor Rachel's assertion, but in answer to her son's
inquiries, he plainly manifested that he neither knew nor cared who had
bought her, or to what part of the country she had been sent. Thomas
represented his own miserable condition, in being sold from one to
another, and subject to the will of whoever happened to be his owner. He
intreated his father to purchase him, with a view to manumission; but
himself and his proposition were both treated with supreme contempt.
Thus rejected by his father, and unable to discover any traces of his
mother, he returned disheartened to Louisville, and was soon after sent
to New-Orleans to be sold. Mr. John P. Darg, a speculator in slaves,
bought him; and he soon after married a girl named Mary, who belonged to
his new master. Mr. Darg went to New-York, to visit some relatives, and
took Thomas with him. It was only a few days after their arrival in the
city, that the slave left him, and went to Isaac T. Hopper to ask a
lodging. When he acknowledged that he was a fugitive, intending to take
refuge in Canada, it was deemed imprudent for him to remain under the
roof of a person so widely known as an abolitionist; but a very
benevolent and intelligent Quaker lady, near eighty years old, named
Margaret Shoemaker, gladly gave him shelter.

When Friend Hopper went to his place of business, after parting with the
colored stranger, he saw an advertisement in a newspaper called the Sun,
offering one thousand dollars reward for the apprehension and return of
a mulatto man, who had stolen seven or eight thousand dollars from a
house in Varick-street. A proportionate reward was offered