In the city it was a daily occurrence for slaveholders from the southern states to catch their slaves, and by certificate from Recorder Riker take them back.

I often felt serious apprehensions of danger, and yet I felt also that I must begin the world somewhere.
I was earning respectable wages, and by means of evening schools and private tuition, was making encouraging progress in my studies.
Up to this time, it had never occurred to me that I was a slave in another and a more serious sense.

All my serious impressions of mind had been with reference to the slavery from which I had escaped.

Slavery had been my theme of thought day and night.
In the spring of 1829, I found my mind unusually perplexed about the state of the slave.

I was enjoying rare privileges in attending a Sabbath school; the great value of Christian knowledge began to be impressed upon my mind to an extent I had not been conscious of before.