Natchez (MS) Courier, "A Big Batch of Runaways," October 4, 1850

A BIG BATCH OF RUNAWAYS.--We find the following despatch in the Delta of Friday: 

   "One hundred and forty fugitive slaves left Pittsburg on Saturday, for Canada--well armed--resolved to die rather than be captured."

   Such is the announcement we find in the Vicksburg Sentinel, and the Disunion papers throughout the State will doubtless think the despatch a Godsend. Whether the Mississippian will again head it, with the joyous exclamation--"The work goes bravely on"--remains to be seen. Strange that these disunionists should rejoice in every attack upon the South! But so it is. Every thing that tends to weaken the Union; every rub the South receives, is to them a source of gratification, inasmuch as they think that thereby the probable existence of the Union is shortened. 

   As to the above, however, the inference to be drawn is exactly contrary to what they would wish. The announcement is a direct and palpable proof of how effective a bill is that recently passed for the delivery of fugitive slaves, and which constitutes one of the main features of the adjustment the disunionists so bitterly denounce. So stringent is the bill, so efficacious will it be found to remedy one of the wonrgs of which the South has been justly complaining, that as soon as they hear of its passage, 140 fugitive slaves, who have previously escaped to and been secreted in a free State, leave for Canada, where they will be beyond the reach of the law of Congress; and they go armed too, knowing that nothing but force and Canada will save them from the grasp of the law. 

   And this law, the very apprehension of which causes such a stampede from a free State to Canada, is ridiculed and lampooned by the disunion journals, as an inoperative act!

   And yet, what Canada is now, they would make every free State in the Union! Wherever the banner of the Union now floats, the fugitive slave bill exerts its power to restore property to rightful owners. Let a different banner wave over Mississippi and South Carolina, from that which floats over their Northern sister States, and the Ohio river would take the place of the St. Lawrence, and every free State become a Canada. Where one now escapes, one hundred would then, while the chances of recapture would be precisely in the inverse ratio, as compared with the present.