, 1835, I proceeded from St. Michael's to Mr.
William Freeland's, my new home. Mr. Freeland lived only three miles
from St. Michael's, on an old worn out farm, which required much labor
to restore it to anything like a self-supporting establishment.

I was not long in finding Mr. Freeland to be a very different man
from Mr. Covey. Though not rich, Mr. Freeland was what may be called a
well-bred southern gentleman, as different from Covey, as a well-trained
and hardened Negro breaker is from the best specimen of the first
families of the south. Though Freeland was a slaveholder, and shared
many of the vices of his class, he seemed alive to the sentiment of
honor. He had some sense of justice, and some feelings of humanity. He
was fretful, impulsive and passionate, but I must do him the justice
to say, he was free from the mean and selfish characteristics which
distinguished the creature from which I had now, happily, escaped.
He was open, frank, imperative, and practiced no concealments,{199}
disdaining to play the spy. In all this, he was the opposite of the
crafty Covey.

Among the many advantages gained in my change from Covey's to
Freeland's--startling as the statement may be--was the fact that
the latter gentleman made no profession of religion. I assert _most
unhesitatingly_, that the religion of the south--as I have observed
it and proved it--is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes; the
justifier of the most appalling barbarity; a sanctifier of the most
hateful frauds; and a secure shelter, under which the darkest, foulest,
grossest, and most infernal abominations fester and flourish. Were
I again to be reduced to the condition of a slave, _next_ to that
calamity, I should regard the fact of being the slave of a religious
slaveholder, the greatest that could befall me. For all slaveholders
with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have
found them, almost invariably, the vilest, meanest and basest of
their class. Exceptions there may be, but this is true of religious
slaveholders, _as a class_. It is not for me to explain the fact. Others
may do that; I simply state it as a fact, and leave the theological,
and psychological inquiry, which it raises, to be decided by others
more competent than myself. Religious slaveholders, like religious
persecutors, are ever extreme in their malice and violence. Very near my
new home, on an adjoining farm, there lived the Rev. Daniel Weeden, who
w