long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint
of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a
testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from
chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirits, and
filled my heart with ineffable sadness. The mere recurrence, even now,
afflicts my spirit, and while I am writing these lines, my tears are
falling. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conceptions of
the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that
conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery,
and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to
be impressed with a sense of the soul-killing power of slavery, let him
go to Col. Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance day, place himself
in the deep, pine woods, and there let him, in silence, thoughtfully
analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, and
if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh
in his obdurate heart."

The remark is not unfrequently made, that slaves are the most contended
and happy laborers in the world. They dance and sing, and make all
manner of joyful noises--so they do; but it is a great mistake to
suppose them happy because they sing. The songs of the slave represent
the sorrows, rather than the joys, of his heart; and he is relieved
by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. Such is the
constitution of the human mind, that, when pressed to extremes, it often
avails itself of the most opposite methods. Extremes meet in mind as
in matter. When the slaves on board of the "Pearl" were overtaken,
arrested, and carried to prison--their hopes for freedom blasted--as
they marched in chains they sang, and found (as Emily Edmunson tells
us) a melancholy relief in singing. The singing of a man cast away on a
desolate island, might be as appropriately considered an evidence of
his contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave. Sorrow and
desolation have their songs, as well as joy and peace. Slaves sing more
to _make_ themselves happy, than to express their happiness.

It is the boast of slaveholders, that their slaves enjoy more of the
physical comforts of life than the peasantry of any country in the
world. My experience contradicts this. The men and the women slaves on
Col. Lloyd's farm, received, as their monthly{78} allowance of food,
eight pounds of pickl