DMG' s Great Great Great Grandfather

JOHN MATTHEWS

Some years ago, when visiting a little town in western Ohio, I found a colored man who made an impression upon me which I shall never forget. This man's name was Matthews. When I saw him he was about sixty years of age. In early life he had been a slave in Virginia.

As a slave Matthews had learned the trade of a carpenter, and his master, seeing that his slave could earn more money for him by taking contracts in various parts of the county in which he lived, permitted him to go about to do so. Matthews, however, soon began to reason, and naturally reached the conclusion that if he could earn money for his master, he could earn it for himself.

So, in 1858, or about that time, he proposed to his master that he would pay fifteen hundred dollars for himself, a certain amount to be paid in cash, and the remainder in yearly instalments. Such a bargain as this was not uncommon in Virginia then. The master, having implicit confidence in the slave, permitted him, after this contract was made, to seek work wherever he could secure the most pay. The result was that Matthews secured a contract for the erection of a building in the State of Ohio.

While the colored man was at work in Ohio the Union armies were declared victorious, the Civil War ended, and freedom came to him, as it did to four million other slaves.

When he was declared a free man by Abraham Lincoln's proclamation, Matthews still owed his former master, according to his ante-bellum contract, three hundred dollars. As Mr. Matthews told the story to me, he said that he was perfectly well aware that by Lincoln's proclamation he was released from all legal obligations, and that in the eyes of nine tenths of the world he was released from all moral obligations to pay his former master a single cent of the unpaid balance. But he said that he wanted to begin his life of freedom with a clean conscience. In order to do this, he walked from his home in Ohio, a distance of three hundred miles, much of the way over the mountains, and placed in his former master's hand every cent of the money that he had promised years before to pay him for his freedom.