We raised our thankful hearts to Heaven, and could have knelt down, like the Neapolitan exiles, and kissed the soil; for we felt that from slavery

"Heaven sure had kept this spot of earth uncurs'd,

To show how all things were created first."

In a few days after we landed, the Rev. Francis Bishop and his lady came and invited us to be their guests; to whose unlimited kindness and watchful care my wife owes, in a great degree, her restoration to health.

We enclosed our letter from the Rev. Mr. May to Mr. Estlin, who at once wrote to invite us to his house at Bristol. On arriving there, both Mr. and Miss Estlin received us as cordially as did our first good Quaker friends in Pennsylvania. [1] It grieves me much to have to mention that he is no more. Everyone who knew him can truthfully say—

"Peace to the memory of a man of worth,

A man of letters, and of manners too!

Of manners sweet as Virtue always wears

When gay Good-nature dresses her in smiles."

It was principally through the extreme kindness of Mr. Estlin, the Right Hon. Lady Noel Byron, Miss Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Reid, Miss Sturch, and a few other good friends, that my wife and myself were able to spend a short time at a school in this country, to acquire a little of that education which we were so shamefully deprived of while in the house of bondage. The school is under the supervision of the Misses Lushington, daughters of the Right Hon. Stephen Lushington, D.C.L. During our stay at the school we received the greatest attention from every one; and I am particularly indebted to Thomas Wilson, Esq., of Bradmore House, Chiswick, (who was then the master,) for the deep interest he took in trying to get me on in my studies. We shall ever fondly and gratefully cherish the memory of our endeared and departed friend, Mr. Estlin. We, as well as the Anti-Slavery cause, lost a good friend in him. However, if departed spirits in Heaven are conscious of the wickedness of this world, and are allowed to speak, he will never fail to plead in the presence of the angelic host, and before the great and just Judge, for downtrodden and outraged humanity.

"Therefore I cannot think thee wholly gone;

The better part of thee is with us still;

Thy soul its hampering clay aside hath thrown,

And only freer wrestles with the ill.

"Thou livest in the life of all good things;

What words thou spak'st for Freedom shall not die;

Thou sleepest not, for now thy Love hath wings

To soar where hence thy hope could hardly fly.

"And often, from that other world, on this

Some gleams from great souls gone before may shine,

To shed on struggling hearts a clearer bliss,

And clothe the Right with lustre more divine.

"Farewell! good man, good angel now! this hand

Soon, like thine own, shall lose its cunning, too;

Soon shall this soul, like thine, bewildered stand,

Then leap to thread the free unfathomed blue."

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

In the preceding pages I have not dwelt upon the great barbarities which are practised upon the slaves; because I wish to present the system in its mildest form, and to show that the "tender mercies of the wicked are cruel." But I do now, however, most solemnly declare, that a very large majority of the American slaves are over-worked, under-fed, and frequently unmercifully flogged. [2]

I have often seen slaves tortured in every conceivable manner. I have seen them hunted down and torn by bloodhounds. [3] I have seen them shamefully beaten, and branded with hot irons. I have seen them hunted, and even burned alive at the stake, frequently for offences that would be applauded if committed by white persons for similar purposes.

In short, it is well known in England, if not all over the world, that the Americans, as a people, are notoriously mean and cruel towards all coloured persons, whether they are bond or free.

"Oh, tyrant, thou who sleepest

On a volcano, from whose pent-up wrath,

Already some red flashes bursting up,

Beware!"

RICHARD BARRETT, PRINTER, MARK LANE, LONDON.

1. The Quakers had a strong reputation among freed blacks and black slaves for being kind and sympathetic. On the other hand, white slave conditions under the Quakers were notoriously poor. Interestingly, the prisons of eastern Pennsylvania—some still in use today—were originally designed around an ideal of solitary confinement employed by the Quakers who built those prisons under government contract in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Source, Nick Yarris, Pennsylvania, Death Row Inmate

2. Moses Roper, whose saga occupies the second half of this volume, will provide these gory details. As a mostly white slave, he was especially reviled by his masters and treated with above average cruelty.

3. Feeding people to dogs was a medieval practiced that was instituted in the Caribbean, Central America and Southern North America, from 1500, first by the Spanish and later by the French, with the best man-eating hounds being bred in Cuba, a country which received more slave shipments from Africa in relation to its land mass than any other colonial plantation other than French San Domingo, which later became Haiti.