through. One of the boys, named Jim, gave us an interesting account of their adventures. He was a shrewd fellow, and had not intended to run away until the day they started, when he decided to come for the sake of the other two, for, said he, “They couldn’t come without me, they didn’t know how.” They were his particular friends; he thought a “heap” of them, and their mother had learned that they were to be sent South in a drove soon after Christmas. The two boys had always been kept on the plantation, had seldom been beyond its boundaries, while he (Jim) had been a kind of sub-overseer, had been sent to market to assist in driving mules, sometimes had charge of a gang of hands, and was therefore more competent to “find the way out” than the other boys were, and was finally persuaded by their old mother to go with them.
They had been provided with passes to spend Christmas with their relatives on another plantation, but hoping to find friends in another direction, they started towards the Ohio River, sixty miles off. The Christmas festivities, which were being celebrated by the slaves on all the plantations, enabled them to supply themselves with food and shelter at the slave quarters along the way. The weather was unusually cold, and they expected trouble in crossing the Ohio, but when they arrived at the river, above Parkersburg, in Virginia, they found it frozen over—very unconstitutional behavior, certainly, on the part of the river, but as their education had been neglected, it could not be expected that the poor fellows would know that it would be wrong for them to avail themselves of the illegal acts of the Ohio River, so they crossed over on the ice. Never having heard of the U. G. R. R., they had skulked and stumbled along half the way to Lake Erie before they fell into the hands of our agents.
