it is
illustrative of a phase of slavery to which I have already referred in
another connection. Besides two other coachmen, Col. Lloyd owned one
named William, who, strangely enough, was often called by his surname,
Wilks, by white and colored people on the home plantation. Wilks was
a very fine looking man. He was about as white as anybody on the
plantation; and in manliness of form, and comeliness of features, he
bore a very striking resemblance to Mr. Murray Lloyd. It was whispered,
and pretty generally admitted as a fact, that William Wilks was a son
of Col. Lloyd, by a highly favored slave-woman, who was still on the
plantation. There were many reasons for believing this whisper, not only
in William's appearance, but in the undeniable freedom which he enjoyed
over all others, and his apparent consciousness of being something more
than a slave to his master. It was notorious, too, that William had a
deadly enemy in Murray Lloyd, whom he so much resembled, and that the
latter greatly worried his father with importunities to sell William.
Indeed, he gave his father no rest until he did sell him, to Austin
Woldfolk, the great slave-trader at that time. Before selling him,
however, Mr. L. tried what giving William a whipping would do, toward
making things smooth; but this was a failure. It was a compromise,
and defeated itself; for,{90} immediately after the infliction, the
heart-sickened colonel atoned to William for the abuse, by giving him
a gold watch and chain. Another fact, somewhat curious, is, that though
sold to the remorseless _Woldfolk_, taken in irons to Baltimore and
cast into prison, with a view to being driven to the south, William, by
_some_ means--always a mystery to me--outbid all his purchasers, paid
for himself, _and now resides in Baltimore, a_ FREEMAN. Is there not
room to suspect, that, as the gold watch was presented to atone for the
whipping, a purse of gold was given him by the same hand, with which
to effect his purchase, as an atonement for the indignity involved in
selling his own flesh and blood. All the circumstances of William, on
the great house farm, show him to have occupied a different position
from the other slaves, and, certainly, there is nothing in the supposed
hostility of slaveholders to amalgamation, to forbid the supposition
that William Wilks was the son of Edward Lloyd. _Practical_ amalgamation
is common in every neighborhood where I have been in slavery.

Col. Lloyd was no