It was the night before Christmas

[David Lockmiller]

By Gillian Brockell in the Washington Post today:

It was the night before Christmas, and as Jarm would remember it later, “though cold, it was as clear and beautiful as Tennessee sky could make it.”

He stood outside the slave cabin with his enslaver’s horse, a stolen saddle full of food and a forged travel pass. He sneaked inside briefly to kiss his sleeping mother on the forehead. For her own safety and his, she couldn’t know he was about to escape.

Thus began a weeks-long journey as Jarm and a friend traveled north to Canada and freedom. They encountered suspicious White people who physically attacked them and demanded to see their passes, and sympathetic White and Black people who fed them and their horses and guided them onto an Underground Railroad they didn’t even know existed.

Though their escape was harrowing, Jarm didn’t have to deal with perhaps the greatest threat in his bid for freedom: Jarm’s enslaver, Mannasseth Logue, who was also his biological father. Nor did he have to run from a slave-catching posse called by Logue. No posse had been called because Logue didn’t know Jarm was gone.

[David Lockmiller]

Jarm, who escaped on his enslaver’s horse on Christmas Eve, made it to Canada, but he didn’t stay there. He soon moved to upstate New York, where he learned to read and write and took the name Jermain Wesley Loguen. He became a respected minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and opened schools for Black children, and his home became an important stop on the Underground Railroad.

But because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Loguen was not entirely safe. Even in abolitionist-heavy New York, bounty hunters could have legally attempted to recapture him at any time.

In February 1860, 26 years after his escape, he received a letter from the widow of his enslaver demanding $1,000, or else, she threatened, she would sell him to someone who would come up and get him. Loguen’s furious reply is one for the history books and worth reading in full, but this is how he closed:

I will not budge one hair’s breadth. I will not breathe a shorter breath, even to save me from your persecutions. I stand among a free people, who, I thank God, sympathize with my rights, and the rights of mankind; and if your emissaries and venders come here to re-enslave me, and escape the unshrinking vigor of my own right arm, I trust my strong and brave friends, in this City and State, will be my rescuers and avengers.

[Gene C]

Thanks for posting this David.
I went to Wikipedia to learn a little more about Jermain Wesley Loguen. An interesting man.
There was also a link there for the letter he received and wrote back to his fathers widow.

https://lettersofnote.com/2012/11/16/wretched-woman/

[David Lockmiller]

(12-26-2021 02:27 PM)Gene C Wrote:  Thanks for posting this David.
I went to Wikipedia to learn a little more about Jermain Wesley Loguen. An interesting man.
There was also a link there for the letter he received and wrote back to his fathers widow.

https://lettersofnote.com/2012/11/16/wretched-woman/

Jermain Wesley Loguen wrote back to the woman:

You are a woman; but had you a woman’s heart you could never have insulted a brother by telling him you sold his only remaining brother and sister, because he put himself beyond your power to convert him into money.

You sold my brother and sister, ABE and ANN, and 12 acres of land, you say, because I ran away. Now you have the unutterable meanness to ask me to return and be your miserable chattel, or in lieu thereof send you $1000 to enable you to redeem the land, but not to redeem my poor brother and sister! If I were to send you money it would be to get my brother and sister, and not that you should get land.