Considering the wonderful ease and expedition with which fugitives may be recovered by law, it would be very strange if mistakes did not sometimes occur. How often they occur cannot, of course, be known, and it is only when a claim is defeated, that we are made sensible of the exceedingly precarious tenure by which a poor friendless negro at the north holds his personal liberty.  A few years since, a girl of the name of Mary Gilmore was arrested in Philadelphia, as a fugitive slave from Maryland.  Testimony was not wanting in support of the claim; yet it was most conclusively proved that she was the daughter of poor Irish parents—­having not a drop of negro blood in her veins—­that the father had absconded, and that the mother had died a drunkard in the Philadelphia hospital, and that the infant had been kindly received and brought up in a colored family.  Hence the attempt to make a slave of her.  In the spring of 1839, a colored man was arrested in Philadelphia, on a charge of having absconded from his owner twenty-three years before.  This man had a wife and family depending upon him, and a home where he enjoyed their society; and yet, unless he could find witnesses who could prove his freedom for more than this number of years, he was to be torn from his wife, his children, his home, and doomed for the remainder of his days to toil under the lash. Four witnesses for the claimant swore to his identity, although they had not seen him before for twenty-three years!  By a most extraordinary coincidence, a New England Captain, with whom this negro had sailed twenty-nine years before, in a sloop from Nantucket, happened at this very time to be confined for debt in the same prison with the alleged slave, and the Captain’s testimony, together with that of some other witnesses, who had known the man previous to his pretended elopement, so fully established his freedom, that the Court discharged him.

Another mode of legal kidnapping still remains to be described.  By the Federal Constitution, fugitives from justice are to be delivered up, and under this constitutional provision, a free negro may be converted into a slave without troubling even a Justice of the Peace to hear the evidence of the captor’s claim.  A fugitive slave is, of course, a felon—­he not only steals himself, but also the rags on his back which belong to his master.  It is understood he has taken refuge in New York, and his master naturally wishes to recover him with as little noise, trouble, and delay as possible.  The way is simple and easy.  Let the Grand Jury indict A.B. for stealing wearing apparel, and let the indictment, with an affidavit of the criminal’s flight, be forwarded by the Governor of the State, to his Excellency of New York, with a requisition for the delivery of A.B., to the agent appointed to receive him.  A warrant is, of course, issued to “any Constable of the State of New York,” to arrest A.B.  For what purpose?—­to