The real distance was great enough, but the imagined distance was, to our ignorance, even greater.

Every slaveholder seeks to impress his slave with a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory, and of his own almost illimitable power.

We all had vague and indistinct notions of the geography of the country.
The distance, however, is not the chief trouble.

The nearer are the lines of a slave state and the borders of a free one, the greater the peril.

Hired kidnappers infest these borders.