grity, discretion, and strict
Christian principle. RICHARD EELLS. EZRA FISHER."

Quincy, Jan. 9th, 1839.

TESTIMONY.--"I lived for thirty years in Virginia, and have travelled
extensively through Fauquier, Culpepper, Jefferson, Stafford,
Albemarle and Charlotte Counties; my remarks apply to these Counties.

"The negro houses are miserably poor, generally they are a shelter
from neither the wind, the rain, nor the snow, and the earth is the
floor. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are only
exceptions; you may sometimes see puncheon floor, but never, or almost
never a plank floor. The slaves are generally without _beds or
bedsteads_; some few have cribs that they fasten up for themselves in
the corner of the hut. Their bed-clothes are a nest of rags thrown
upon a crib, or in the corner; sometimes there are three or four
families in one small cabin. Where the slaveholders have more than one
family, they put them in the same quarter till it is filled, then
build another. I have seen exceptions to this, when only one family
would occupy a hut, and where were tolerably comfortable bed-clothes.

"Most of the slaves in these counties are _miserably clad_. I have
known slaves who went without shoes all winter, perfectly barefoot.
The feet of many of them are frozen. As a general fact the planters do
not serve out to their slaves, drawers, or any under clothing, or
vests, or overcoats. Slaves sometimes, by working at night and on
Sundays, get better things than their masters serve to them.

"Whilst these things are true of _field-hands_, it is also true that
many slaveholders clothe their _waiters_ and coachmen like gentlemen.
I do not think there is any difference between the slaves of
professing Christians and others; at all events, it is so small as to
be scarcely noticeable.

"I have seen men and women at work in the field more than half naked:
and more than once in passing, when the overseer was not near, they
would stop and draw round them a tattered coat or some ribbons of a
skirt to hide their nakedness and shame from the stranger's eye."

Mr. GEORGE W. WESTGATE, a member of the Congregational Church in
Quincy, Illinois, who has spent the larger part of twelve years
navigating the rivers of the south-western slave states with keel
boats, as a trader, gives the following testimony as to the clothing
and lodging of the slaves.

"In lower Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, the clothing of the
slaves