the stream. A shower of curses followed me from the
shore; but the Negroes under me, accustomed to obey, and, alas! too
degraded and ignorant of the advantages of liberty to know what they
were forfeiting, offered no resistance to my command." "Often since
that day," says he, "has my soul been pierced with bitter anguish at
the thought of having been thus instrumental in consigning to the
infernal bondage of slavery so many of my fellow-beings. I have
wrestled in prayer with God for forgiveness. Having experienced myself
the sweetness of liberty, and knowing too well the after misery of a
great majority of them, my infatuation has seemed to me an
unpardonable sin. But I console myself with the thought that I acted
according to my best light, though the light that was in me was
darkness."[3]

Henson finally arrived with these slaves at the farm of his master's
brother, five miles south of the Ohio and fifteen miles above the
Yellow Banks, on the Big Blackfords' Creek in Davies County, Kentucky,
April, 1825. Here the situation as to food, shelter and general
comforts was a little better than in Maryland. He served on this
plantation as superintendent and having here among more liberal white
people the opportunity for religious instruction, he developed into a
successful preacher, recognized by the Conference of the Methodist
Episcopal Church.

There he remained waiting for his master three years. Unable to
persuade his wife to move to Kentucky, however, his master decided to
abandon the idea and sent an agent to bring upon those slaves another
heartrending scene of the auction block, though Henson himself was
exempted. Henson saw with deepest grief the agony which he recollected
in his own mother and which he now unfortunately said in the persons
with whom he had long been associated. He could not, therefore,
refrain from experiencing the bitterest feeling of hatred of the
system and its promoters. He furthermore lamented as never before his
agency in bringing the poor creatures hither, if such had to be the
end of the expedition. Freedom then became the all-absorbing purpose
that filled his soul. He said that he stood ready to pray, toil,
dissemble, plot like a fox and fight like a tiger.

A new light dawned upon the dark pathway of Josiah Henson, however, in
1828. A Methodist preacher, an anti-slavery white man, talked with
Henson one day confidentially about securing freedom. He thereupon
suggested to Henson to ob