cquitted and escaped out of their hands. Still, it
was deemed by his brethren to be imprudent for him to preach any more in
the place, as some of the more reckless masters swore violence against
him. This good man's name is remembered dearly, till this day, by slaves
in that county. I met with a fugitive about a year ago, who remembered
distinctly the words spoken by Mr. G., and by which his own mind was
awakened to a sense of the value of his soul. He said, in the course of
his preaching, addressing himself to the slaves, "You have precious
immortal souls, that are worth far more to you than your bodies are to
your masters;" or words to that effect. But while these words interested
many slaves, they also made many masters exceedingly angry, and they
tortured his words into an attempt to excite the slaves to rebellion.

Some of my master's slaves who had families, were regularly married, and
others were not; the law makes no provision for such marriages, and the
only provision made by the master was, that they should obtain his leave.
In some cases, after obtaining leave to take his wife, the slave would ask
further leave to go to a minister and be married. I never knew him to deny
such a request, and yet, in those cases where the slave did not ask it, he
never required him to be married by a minister. Of course, no Bibles,
Tracts, or religious books of any kind, were ever given to the slaves; and
no ministers or religious instructors were ever known to visit our
plantation at any time, either in sickness or in health. When a slave was
sick, my master being himself a physician, sometimes attended, and
sometimes he called other physicians. Slaves frequently sickened and died,
but I never knew any provision made to administer to them the comforts, or
to offer to them the hopes of the gospel, or to their friends after their
death.

* * * * *

_There is no one feature of slavery to which the mind recurs with more
gloomy impressions, than to its disastrous influence upon the families of
the masters, physically, pecuniarily, and mentally._

It seems to destroy families as by a powerful blight, large and opulent
slave-holding families, often vanish like a group of shadows at the third
or fourth generation. This fact arrested my attention some years before I
escaped from slavery, and of course before I had any enlightened views of
the moral character of the system. As far back as I can recollect