e bought me.
Moore took me for a debt. McCaully owed Moore for wagons. I was not born
in Missouri but was born in Virginia. From my earliest memory I was
owned by Conrad Hackler; he lived in Grason County. He was a very poor
man, and had no other slave but me. He bought me before I was quite four
years old, for one hundred dollars. Hackler bought me from a man named
William Scott. I must go back by good rights to the beginning and tell
all: Scott bought me first from a young man he met one day in the road,
with a bundle in his arms. Scott, wishing to know of the young man what
he had in his bundle, was told that he had a baby. 'What are you going
to do with it?' said Scott. The young man said that he was going to take
it to his sister; that its mother was dead, and it had nobody to take
care of it. Scott offered the young man a horse for it, and the young
man took him up. This is the way I was told that Scott came by me. I
never knowed anything about my mother or father, but I have always
believed that my mother was a white woman, and that I was put away to
save her character; I have always thought this. Under Hackler I was
treated more like a brute than a human being. I was fed like the dogs;
had a trough dug out of a piece of wood for a plate. After I growed up
to ten years old they made me sleep out in an old house standing off
some distance from the main house where my master and mistress lived. A
bed of straw and old rags was made for me in a big trough called the tan
trough (a trough having been used for tanning purposes). The cats about
the place came and slept with me, and was all the company I had. I had
to work with the hoe in the field and help do everything in doors and
out in all weathers. The place was so poor that some seasons he would
not raise twenty bushels of corn and hardly three bushels of wheat. As
for shoes I never knowed what it was to have a pair of shoes until I was
grown up. After I growed up to be a woman my master thought nothing of
taking my clothes off, and would whip me until the blood would run down
to the ground. After I was twenty-five years old they did not treat me
so bad; they both professed to get religion about that time; and my
master said he would never lay the weight of his finger on me again.
Once after that mistress wanted him to whip me, but he didn't do it, nor
never whipped me any more. After awhile my master died; if they had gone
according to law I would have been hired ou