Leadership Quote by Philip Hone

The sentence does two things at once: it elicits sympathy for enslaved people while quietly rehearsing the logic of control that slavery required. “Poor wretches” is compassion with a catch. It pities, but it also diminishes, casting the enslaved as objects of misery rather than agents with claims. Then Hone stacks blunt verbs like indictments: “stolen,” “carried,” “sold.” The cadence reads like a receipt for human trafficking, each step stripping away any euphemism about “property” or “labor.” For a politician in the early republic, that clarity is striking because it admits the foundational violence the system depended on.

The pivot comes at “from which they sought to escape.” Hone frames flight not as criminality but as inevitability: the natural consequence of kidnapping and sale. “On the first occasion which offered” suggests a constant, rational calculus of freedom, not a sporadic impulse. It’s a line that undercuts the paternalist fantasy that bondage could be softened into stability.

But there’s subtext in what stays unsaid. Hone doesn’t name the captors, the buyers, the law, or the state’s complicity. Passive construction (“were stolen,” “carried”) lets responsibility blur into the atmosphere of commerce. That rhetorical dodge matters in context: Northern political and business elites often condemned slavery’s brutality while profiting from its supply chains and policing its fugitives. The sentence becomes a moral observation that stops short of an accusation, a way to recognize the crime without volunteering to dismantle the machinery.