Historical voices

For such friendship I felt deeply grateful, and bitter as are my recollections of slavery, I love to recall any instances of kindness, any sunbeams of humane treatment, which found way to my soul through the iron grating of my house of…

It is quite true, that this interest was never very marked, and it seldom showed itself in anything more than in giving me a piece of bread when I was hungry; but this was a great favor on a slave plantation, and I was the only one of the…

The balsam was not more healing to the wound in my head, than her kindness was healing to the wounds in my spirit, made by the unfeeling words of Aunt Katy.

In a family where there was so much that was harsh, cold and indifferent, the slightest word or look of kindness passed, with me, for its full value.

Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self defense, the white assaulting party is fully justified by southern, or Maryland, public opinion, in shooting the slave down.

The usual pretext for killing a slave is, that the slave has offered resistance.

While I heard of numerous murders committed by slaveholders on the Eastern Shores of Maryland, I never knew a solitary instance in which a slaveholder was either hung or imprisoned for having murdered a slave.

It did produce a sensation; but, incredible to tell, the moral sense of the community was blunted too entirely by the ordinary nature of slavery horrors, to bring the murderess to punishment.

I can only say—believe it or not—that I have said nothing but the literal truth, gainsay it who may.

This done, and the guilty perpetrator of one of the most foul murders goes unwhipped of justice, and uncensured by the community in which he lives.

His bare word would go further in a court of law, than the united testimony of ten thousand black witnesses.

His fame as an overseer went abroad, and his horrid crime was not even submitted to judicial investigation.

That very convenient covert for all manner of cruelty and outrage that cowardly alarm-cry, that the slaves would “take the place,” was pleaded, in extenuation of this revolting crime, just as it had been cited in defense of a thousand…

This devilish outrage, this fiendish murder, produced, as it was well calculated to do, a tremendous sensation.

All the coolness, savage barbarity and freedom from moral restraint, which are necessary in the character of a pirate-chief, centered, I think, in this man Gore.

There was a stern will, an iron-like reality, about this Gore, which would have easily made him the chief of a band of pirates, had his environments been favorable to such a course of life.

When he whipped, he seemed to do so from a sense of duty, and feared no consequences.

The very presence of this man Gore was painful, and I shunned him as I would have shunned a rattlesnake.

Guilty or not guilty, it is enough to be accused, to be sure of a flogging.

Edward Lloyd, himself; acting always up to the maxim, practically maintained by slaveholders, that it is better that a dozen slaves suffer under the lash, without fault, than that the master or the overseer should seem to have been wrong…

But, in this class, as in all other classes, there are characters of marked individuality, even while they bear a general resemblance to the mass.

The office of overseer takes this raw material of vulgarity and brutality, and stamps it as a distinct class of southern society.

They constitute a separate fraternity at the south, not less marked than is the fraternity of Park Lane bullies in New York.

To be a SLAVE, was thought to be bad enough; but to be a poor man’s slave, was deemed a disgrace, indeed.