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Ro. J. CHRISTIANS.

jy 21--ts.

From his infancy up to the hour of his escape, not a breath of free air
had he ever been permitted to breathe. He was first owned by Mrs.
Caroline Johnson, "a stingy widow, the owner of about fifty slaves, and
a member of Dr. Plummer's church." Elijah, at her death, was willed to
her son, Major Johnson, who was in the United States service. Elijah
spoke of him as a "favorable man," but added, "I'd rather be free. I
believe I can treat myself better than he can or anybody else." For the
last nineteen years he had been hired out, sometimes as waiter,
sometimes in a tobacco factory, and for five years in the _Coal Mines_.

At the mines he was treated very brutally, but at Cornelius Hall's
Tobacco factory, the suffering he had to endure seems almost incredible.
The poor fellow, with the scars upon his person and the unmistakable
earnestness of his manner, only needed to be seen and heard to satisfy
the most incredulous of the truth of his story. For refusing to be
flogged, one time at Hall's Factory, the overseer, in a rage, "took up a
hickory club" and laid his head "open on each side." Overpowered and
wounded, he was stripped naked and compelled to receive THREE HUNDRED
LASHES, by which he was literally excoriated from head to foot. For six
months afterwards he was "laid up." Last year he was hired out for "one
hundred and eighty dollars," out of which he "received but five
dollars." This year he brought "one hundred and ninety dollars." Up to
the time he escaped, he had received "two dollars," and the promise of
"more at Christmas." Left brothers and sisters, all ignorant of his way
of escape. The following pass brought away by Elijah speaks for itself,
and will doubtless be interesting to some of our readers who are
ignorant of what used to be Republican usages in the "land of the Free."

RICHMOND, July 3d, 1857.

Permit the Bearer _Elijah_ to pass to and from my FACTORY, to
_Frederick Williams, In the Vallie_, for one month, untill 11
o'clock at night.

By _A.B. Wells_,

R.J. CHRISTIAN.

[PINE APPLE FACTORY.]

As usual, the Vigilance Committee tendered aid to Elijah, and forwarded
him on to Canada, whence he wrote back as follows:

TORONTO, Canada West, July 28. Dear friend in due respect to
your humanity and nobility I now take my pen in hand to inform
you of my health. I am enjoying a reasonable proportion