to absolute slavery without judge or jury.

I can well remember the Christiana riot. I was not living far from
there at that time. Those were the days that tried the poor Negro's
soul, and were a disgrace to the white man. I was then about fifteen
years old and we had to suffer everything but death, and sometimes
that; for the slave hunters were like their bloodhounds, always upon
the Negro's track. There were daily riots between the slaves and Negro
hunters.

While quite young, and claiming to be a Christian, too, I was almost
ready to say with Job, "Cursed was the night wherein I was born, and
the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived." My
disgust at the treatment given my people made me resolve to leave the
country and to go to Liberia, Africa, because the fugitive slave law
was too obnoxious for me both in principle and practice. Because of
the outbreak of the Civil War, however, I failed to carry out this
plan.

Now I recall my third Presidential election. The candidates were Gen.
Winfield Scott and Franklin Pierce. Pierce was the Democratic
candidate and he overwhelmingly defeated Gen. Scott, which placed the
Democrats in absolute power. All the fire-eaters of the South with the
copperheads of the North held full sway, arrayed against the
anti-slavery party of the North and East, and backed by the President,
the Supreme Court and Congress. The world knows the condition of the
country at that time. The Negro's condition during all of that
administration recalls to my memory a picture too dark to attempt to
describe.

During this administration there was a man by the name of Dred Scott,
owned by an army officer named Emerson. He took Scott into a free
territory; this slave, Scott, sued for his freedom; the case was
carried from court to court until it reached the Supreme Court, which
handed down that opinion known throughout the world as the Dred Scott
decision. It meant that a Negro had no rights that a white man was
bound to respect; that he was of an inferior order, and altogether
unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political
relation; and so far inferior that they need not be respected, but
might be reduced to slavery for the white man's benefit. This decision
placed the damnation seal on the poor Negro in the United States. It
left him absolutely without help.

In 1856 opened the great political drama. The candidates were James
Buchanan, the Democrat, John C. F