Page:Women of distinction.djvu/111

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WOMEN OF DISTINCTION.
65

CHAPTER XII.

HARRIET, THE MODERN MOSES.

In those dark days of our history when the negro for the most part was only so much property in the hands of his owner rather than a human being or an American citizen, God condescended to use some of that despised and oppressed people as His agencies of love and mercy. Among these agencies was one "Harriet" who was born a slave in the eastern part of Maryland. Finally deciding that she would no longer be the chattel of a slave owner, she, with her brothers, resolved to escape to the North. When the journey was a little more than begun her brothers turned back, leaving Harriet to pursue the journey alone. This she did bravely, sometimes without food, without shelter or without friends. Still determined she went on, and after many days traveling alone she found herself beyond the bounds of slavery. But not satisfied with freedom for herself only, she returned as best she could as many as nineteen times and carried other slaves to the then land of the free, until, besides herself, she had been the guiding star of the east to as many as four hundred human beings from the then land of oppression to the then land of freedom. Was not this remarkable for an uneducated slave to outgeneral all the intelligence of the South in her locality? One very friendly and seemingly truthful lady, "Emma P. Telford," in the October number of the Household (I think of 1891 or '92),