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horrid scenes enacted, where every child and feeble woman is at the brutal mercy of brutalised man; where marriage is a fiction, and five millions of people live practically in a state of unrecognised whoredom and polygamy.

Would that English mothers and English daughters could feel as they ought for those whose virtue and honour, whose life and liberty, may be purchased by any libertine wretch, who has the "almighty dollar" in plenty in his pocket. Let us but think of our sisters, our wives, our children, and thank God with them, that

"I was not born a little slave,

To labour in the sun;

To wish I was but in my grave,
And all my labour done."

Many an English reader, knowing that every year we pay a million of money as interest for the twenty millions by which the freedom of West Indian slaves was purchased, and spend nearly another million to keep down the slave trade of America, Cuba, and Brazil, are very earnest in declaring their abhorrence of American slavery, and, like the Times, finds fault with President Lincoln's government for not putting an end to slavery by proclamation, thinking that our British hands are quite clean. But they forget the share that England has had in the bondage of the human race. Liverpool and Bristol for years was the seat of the African slave trade; and, once upon a time, G. F. Cooke, the actor, on the boards of a Liverpool theatre, when displeased with his audience for hissing him, turned fiercely on them, and told them that Liverpool was paved with the blood of the negro slaves; and in 1862 it is not quite clear of the same, vide the Nightingale Slaver.

Three hundred years ago Sir John Hawkins procured the first cargo of negroes from the coast of Guinea, and took them to Hispaniola, and so profitable was his trip that a new expedition was soon prepared, of which Queen Elizabeth shared the profits. This royal patronage of the slave trade was further extended under other reigns, and,

on the 10th of December, 1770, our good King George issued a proclamation under his own hand, commanding the Governor of Virginia, "upon pain of the highest displeasure, to assent to no law by which the importation of slaves shall be in any respect prohibited and obstructed." Before we then heartily condemn the United States, let us remember that when they would not have slavery, it was forced upon them by the English Government.

When in 1645 the ship of one Thomas Keyser and James Smith brought a cargo of negroes to Boston, they were heavily fined and compelled to return those negroes again to Africa. Noble men were they of Massachusetts; and despite the Irish and rowdy element of Boston and Portland, yet noble men are they at the present hour. There the fugitive slave has liberty and protection.

Virginia, long the battle ground of freedom during the old war, as well as the new one, often spoke out nobly against slavery. Her patriots, like Jefferson, though himself a slaveholder, yet steadily resented the influence of that growing evil. At that time, Franklin spoke through the press, and memorials from all the States were sent to King George. The king was inexorable; and while the English judges declared that when a slave set his foot on the soil of England he was free, yet the monarch stood in the path of humanity, and became the pillar of the American Slave Trade.

England gave America slavery. England by the use of her cotton, has mainly helped to continue it; and let but English sympathy be withdrawn from the South, and soon slavery there must fall. It lies with Christian men and women to expose its evils, denounce its cruelties, lay open its horrors, and spare not its infamous immoralities. Truly there is a God that judgeth the earth. There is wanted fact upon fact to enlighten the English public, when its leading papers palliate and excuse the atrocities of the South. They would ignore the existence of four millions out of the twenty who live and breathe beyond

the Atlantic under the stars and stripes. Christian England should stand to a man opposed to those who would kill every slave found with arms in hand, or away from his master's plantation; who have no scruples in brutalizing, burning, flaying, flogging, scourging, and shooting the wives and daughters of their runaway slaves.

Every sickening brutality is practised upon the hapless men and women, without hope of any redress; surely these injustices cry to heaven for vengeance. How long, Lord, how long. Stonewall Jackson may, with the courage and piety of a Cromwell, but without his rightful cause, carry the war into Maryland, and Pope and M'Clellan be driven back to the Free States; but yet with one burst of freedom, even Dr. Mackay shall re-echo from Washington to the "Times" of to-morrow, his favourite phrase: "There's a good time coming, boys, Wait a little longer."

The day of escape from bondage will come to all, as it has to some; and surely their cry will be heard, and the refrain so long sung by the negroes of the South:

"O let my people go,"

be answered from heaven, perhaps even with a slaughter as great as that of the "smart Egyptians," when they came onward with all the panoply of their chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea, there to sink amid the waters. Then sang Miriam :

"Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea,

Jehovah hath triumph'd, his people are free."

September 20, 1862.

W. M. S.

THE EXPERIENCE OF A SLAVE

IN

SOUTH CAROLINA.

CHAPTER I.

MY BIRTH AND TRAINING.

I WAS born in South Carolina. My grandfather was stolen from Africa. My father learned the African method of curing snake bites, and was in consequence, called Dr. Clavern. My mother's name was Betty. I had five brothers and five sisters. Of these, two brothers and two sisters were dead when I left the plantation. My earliest recollection was of my mistress, whom I feared above all persons, as she used every means in her power to spite me. The reason for this was as follows:-When I was about ten years old, I and her son were digging for hickory root to amuse ourselves with, when he, seeing that I was obtaining mine quicker than he, kicked me on the nose, upon which I wiped the blood upon him. He ran and informed his mother, who whipped me on my naked back, to console her son, till the blood ran down. After that, she always hated not only me but my family, and would even stint my mother's allowance; and since then, I had many whippings through her influenee.

My mistress had four daughters, viz. :-Anne, Eliza, Jane, and Martha. Of Anne, the eldest, I knew but little, as she married when I was very young, and went to another plantation. Eliza, the next, was the worst of the three. She used to whip me almost as much as my misOf Jane, the next, I also knew but little, as she married a minister named Brailly, when I was very young; but, as far as I know, she was the best of the three. Martha, the youngest, was very bad. I will give a speci

tress.

men of her abilities. One day, as she was returning from a walk in the garden, she saw my youngest brother, William, walking in the yard, and, from pure mischief, she picked some horse nettles, and, coming up to him, (he was quite naked), began to sting him with them, and, as he ran away, she ran after him, and kept up with him, stinging him on the sides and back, till at last he fell down through pain; nevertheless, she kept on stinging him, without any intermission; at last he got up and began running, and by that time I got up to him, (I was about ten years of age, and he being between five and six) and I cried out to him, "Run faster, William, run faster," whereupon she turned upon me, and I being able to run faster than she, I escaped her, and by that means my brother William effected his escape. When William got home, he was covered with large lumps all over his body. When she was married she had my sister whipped to death. The circumstances were as follows:

My sister was religious, and perhaps it stung her conscience, or it might have been for some other reason; but, at all events, she ordered my sister to leave off praying, and as she discovered my sister did not obey her commands, she asked her husband, Gamble M'Farden (a member of the Salem Brick Church, who was, if possible, worse than herself, and she was a member also) to give her a hundred lashes, and he took her and hung her up by the hands to the beef gallows, (an apparatus on which they hang oxen when they skin them) and called his negro slave Toney, and ordered him to give her a hundred lashes, and he commenced beating her incessantly; he then remonstrated with his master, because she fainted, and his brutal master, (who, though a member of a Christian church, was notwithstanding, equal to the devil himself) coolly ordered him to bring a pail of water and throw over her, to revive her; and when she came to, he ordered him to continue, which Toney did; but at length made a pause, and told his master that he had given her fifty lashes, but the brutal answer was, "Give me the whip, and I will give her the other fifty, which he did. She died at the end of three weeks, leaving two children, a boy and girl, who, with my father, I now hope to buy. My mistress also had four sons, James, Robert, Thomas, and Mack. James English, a member of Brick Church, was as bad as any of them; he was married when I was little. I worked on his

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