aster wanted money, and he therefore sold Elizabeth and six of her
children to seven different purchasers. The family relationship is
almost the only solace of slavery. While the mother, brothers, and
sisters are permitted to meet together in the negro hut after the hour
of labour, the slaves are comparatively content with their oppressed
condition; but deprive them of this, the only privilege which they as
human beings are possessed of, and nothing is left but the animal part
of their nature--the living soul is extinguished within them. With them
there is nothing to love--everything to hate. They feel themselves
degraded to the condition not only of mere animals, but of the most
ill-used animals in the creation.

Not needing the services of his young relative, Dr. Young hired him to
the proprietor of the _St. Louis Times_, the best master William ever
had in slavery. Here he gained the scanty amount of education he
acquired at the South. This kind treatment by his editorial master
appears to have engendered in the heart of William a consciousness of
his own manhood, and led him into the commission of an offence similar
to that perpetrated by Frederick Douglass, under similar
circumstances--the assertion of the right of self-defence. He gallantly
defended himself against the attacks of several boys older and bigger
than himself, but in so doing was guilty of the unpardonable sin of
lifting his hand against white lads; and the father of one of them,
therefore, deemed it consistent with his manhood to lay in wait for the
young slave, and beat him over the head with a heavy cane till the
blood gushed from his nose and ears. From the effects of that treatment
the poor lad was confined to his bed for five weeks, at the end of which
time he found that, to his personal sufferings, were superadded the
calamity of the loss of the best master he ever had in slavery.

His next employment was that of waiter on board a steam-boat plying on
the Mississippi. Here his occupation again was pleasant, and his
treatment good; but the freedom of action enjoyed by the passengers in
travelling whithersoever they pleased, contrasted strongly in his mind
with his own deprivation of will as a slave. The natural result of this
comparison was an intense desire for freedom--a feeling which was never
afterwards eradicated from his breast. This love of liberty was,
however, so strongly counteracted by affection for his mother and
sisters, that altho