I inquired of a colored man how I could get on to New York. He directed me
to the William-street depot, and thither I went, taking the train that night.
I reached New York Tuesday morning, having completed the journey in less
than twenty-four hours.

My free life began on the third of September, 1838. On the morning
of the fourth of that month, after an anxious and most perilous but safe
journey, I found myself in the big city of New York, a FREE MAN--
one more added to the mighty throng which, like the confused waves
of the troubled sea, surged to and fro between the lofty walls of Broadway.
Though dazzled with the wonders which met me on every hand, my thoughts
could not be much withdrawn from my strange situation. For the moment,
the dreams of my youth and the hopes of my manhood were completely fulfilled.
The bonds that had held me to "old master" were broken. No man now
had a right to call me his slave or assert mastery over me. I was
in the rough and tumble of an outdoor world, to take my chance with
the rest of its busy number. I have often been asked how I felt
when first I found myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything
in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer.
A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the
"quick round of blood," I lived more in that one day than in a year
of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words
can but tamely describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after
reaching New York, I said: "I felt as one might feel upon escape
from a den of hungry lions." Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain,
may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill
of pen or pencil. During ten or fifteen years I had been, as it were,
dragging a heavy chain which no strength of mine could break;
I was not only a slave, but a slave for life. I might become a husband,
a father, an aged man, but through all, from birth to death, from the cradle