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imprisoning of the woman was against law, is one of the grossest
outrages, and the receiving or taking of her property is an enor-
mous fraud.
The whole case is one which should be investigated by the
State, which is the parent and protection of her orphan and in-
sane children. She should be taken care of, and her property
taken from these fraudulent trustees and put in the charge of re-
sponsible persons, for the benefit of herself and her heirs.
I confine this memorial to this specific case, because in it is
presented every feature of this question.
1. The protection of a young woman from insult, abuse, pun-
ishment and imprisonment.
2. The protection of the property, from the fraud and robbery
which has every where attended these prisons, and preserving the
same to the lawful heirs of the individual.
No man can make any just complaint against this memorial.
The only parties that can object, and who through others do raise
the clamor, are the men charged in the memorial with the in-
veigling of young women into these prisons, robbing them of
their property, and keeping of them in prison to serve the pur-
poses of the vile and and unprincipled men who, enslave their
bodies and seize their property.
If any slave dealer in the State of Maryland would build a
prison, and then inveigle free colored men, or women or girls,
and keep them in prison until he had the opportunity to send them
away and sell them as slaves, there is not a community in the
State of Maryland that would allow it for one week.
But in our counties and cities, the agents of this foreign power
build prisons, calling them convents, and then by cunningly de-
vised plans, skillfully executed, entice into the meshes of their
nets, unsuspecting young women, whom they coax and court;
until they have so deluded and overcome them, as to get them to
think that they enter of their own accord. Before them they
spread the enchanting scene which bewilders and intoxicates
them, until they have secured them and their property in such a
fixed state that neither can be taken from them. Then they be-
come the drudges and dogs to do their bidding, to come and go,
to any and all parts of the earth, without daring to express an
unwilling desire.
As a citizen of the State of Maryland, I do most earnestly pro-
test before the people of Maryland against the permitting of such
institutions without the most rigid application of law to protect
the individual, and I do pray Almighty God to hasten the day
when these factories for the enslaving and robbing of young Ame-
rican women, shall be held in as utter abhorrence as we hold the
slave factors, who rob the native Africans' of their sons and
daughters.
The enormity or this slavery of young women, and robbing
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