Urgent Plea to President Lincoln: Stop Brutal Treatment of Black Individuals Near the Capital

Question: Summarize this letter written by Lafayette Baker, sent to President Abraham Lincoln Sir. I beg leave respectfully to call your attention to the facts below set forth. The Colored people, slave and free, of this District and the adjoining counties of Maryland are daily subjected to a more ferocious despotism and more flagrant and shameless outrages than were ever before tolerated by any Government claiming to be either wise or humane: It is well known to you Sir, that large numbers of slaves, owned in Maryland, actuated by a supreme desire to participate in the blessings of freedom enjoyed by their fellows in this District, are daily, almost hourly, making attempts to escape from their Masters and fly for refuge to this City. The slave owners of Maryland, whose plantations are becoming desolate by this constant exodus of their chattels, no longer relying upon the protection of their own laws, and legally constituted authorities, have in many cases formed themselves into armed bands for the purpose of pursuing and recapturing escaping slaves. Parties of slaves, men women & children, have been pursued within the bounds of this District, have been fiercely assailed and shot down or remorselessly beaten and the survivors shut up in prisons or conveyed across the Potomac within the protecting arms of the rebel confederacy. Not less than forty slaves (human beings) have been killed in these lawless encounters, and I have information that no less than three dead bodies of slaves thus cruelly slaughtered are now laying in the Woods almost within sight of your own home. Not a month since an armed band of Maryland slave owners surrounded the house of a free negro woman less than three miles from the Capitol, broke open the door, presenting loaded pistols to the heads of its frightened inmates and after exercising all their powers of abuse & insult took away by violence three free negroes. Visiting this City and protected by the assumed authority of Mr Commissioner Cox, these desparadoes break into the houses of colored citizens, thrust loaded pistols into the faces of terrified women and screaming children, and then, protected by legal papers bear off their victims to the tender mercies of the lash and prison, or the hopeless martyrdom of Southern slavery. Along the borders of the Potomac below this City male slaves are now being mustered in gangs and sent over to Virginia as contributions by their Masters to the cause of rebellion, if these men make an effort to escape they are pursued and shot to death by their merciless owners. There is now in Marlborough Jail a negro man whose eyes have been utterly destroyed by a charge of shot fired into his face, and not long since two colored girls were found chained in the garret of a private house in the neighborhood of this City, who after having been cruelly beaten by three men, one of them using a trace chain to inflict the blows, were left, with their backs one mass of festering wounds to the farther horrors of chains and darkness. An instance has just come to my knowledge where a negro woman and three daughters owned by a citizen of this City, still resident here, were sent to Baltimore a few days before the late Emancipation Act was passed, for the sole purpose of evading its provisions, one of those daughters, an intelligent woman, has succeeded in returning to this City and is now claimed as a Slave and threatened with seizure through the agency of Mr Commissioner Cox's summary and illegal writs, It cannot be that such atrocities will be longer permitted, and that men whose every sympathy is with slavery and its co-agent Treason, shall be suffered longer to visit upon the poor slave the hatred they feel for Freedom and the Union. I respectfully ask for such instructions as shall enable me to officially protect the now helpless victims of the Slave owners vengeance, and the perjured oaths of their friends, official and other-wise, in this City and District. I am Sir. Your Obedient Servant. L. C. Baker