The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 | Page 3

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 obtain his employer's consent to visit his old
master in Maryland that he might connect with friends in Ohio along
the way and obtain the sum necessary to purchase himself. His
employer readily consented and with the required pass and a letter of
recommendation from his Methodist friend to a preacher in Cincinnati,
Henson obtained contributions to the amount of one hundred and sixty
dollars on arriving in that city, where he preached to several
congregations. He then proceeded to Chillicothe where the annual

Methodist Conference was in session, his kind friend accompanying
him. With the aid of the influence and exertions of his coworker
Henson was again successful. He then purchased a suit of comfortable
clothes and an excellent horse, with which he traveled leisurely from
town to town, preaching and soliciting as he went. He succeeded so
well that when he arrived at his old home in Maryland, he was much
better equipped than his master. This striking difference and the delay
of Henson along the way from September to Christmas caused his
master to be somewhat angry. Moreover, as his master had lost most of
his slaves and other property in Maryland, he was anxious to have
Henson as a faithful worker to retrieve his losses; but this changed man
would hardly subserve such a purpose.
The conditions which he observed around him were so much worse
than what he had for some time been accustomed to and so changed
was the environment because of the departure or death of friends and
relatives during his absence that Henson resolved to become free. He
then consulted the brother of his master's wife, then a business man in
Washington, whom he had often befriended years before and who was
angry with Henson's master because the latter had defrauded him out of
certain property. This friend, therefore, gladly took up with Henson's
master the question of giving the slave an opportunity to purchase
himself. He carefully explained to the master that Henson had some
money and could purchase himself and that if, in consideration of the
valuable services he had rendered, the master refused to do so, Henson
would become free by escaping to Canada. The master agreed then to
give him his manumission papers for four hundred and fifty dollars, of
which three hundred and fifty dollars was to be in cash and the
remainder in Henson's note. Henson's money and horse enabled him to
pay the cash at once. But his master was to work a trick on him. He did
not receive his manumission papers until March