he truth of
Thomas Jefferson's statement: "The best blood of Virginia runs in the
veins of her slaves." But the case which interested me most was a family
of eight mulattoes, bearing the image and superscription of the great
New England statesman, who paid the rent and grocery bills of their
mother as regularly as he did those of his wife.

Pigs were the scavengers, mud and garbage the rule, while men literally
wallowed in the mire of licentiousness and strong drink. In Congress
they sat and loafed with the soles of their boots turned up for the
inspection of the ladies in the galleries. Their language and gestures
as they expectorated hither and thither were often as coarse as their
positions, while they ranted about the "laws and Constitution," and
cracked their slave-whips over the heads of the dough-faces sent from
the Northern States.

Washington was a great slave mart, and her slave-pen was one of the
most infamous in the whole land. One woman, who had escaped from it, was
pursued in her flight across the long bridge, and was gaining on the
four men who followed her, when they shouted to some on the Virginia
shore, who ran and intercepted her. Seeing her way blocked, and all hope
of escape gone, with one wild cry she clasped her hands above her head,
sprang into the Potomac, and was swept into that land beyond the River
Death, where alone was hope for the American slave. Another woman with
her two children was captured on the steps of the capitol building,
whither she had fled for protection, and this, too, while the stars and
stripes floated over it.

One of President Tyler's daughters ran away with the man she loved, in
order that they might be married, but for this they must reach foreign
soil. A young lady of the White House could not marry the man of her
choice in the United States. The lovers were captured, and she was
brought to His Excellency, her father, who sold her to a slave-trader.
From that Washington slave-pen she was taken to New Orleans by a man who
expected to get twenty-five hundred dollars for her on account of her
great beauty.

My letters to the New York _Tribune_, soon attracted so much attention
that is was unpleasant for me to live in a hotel, and I became the guest
of my friend Mrs. Emma D.E.N. Southworth. It was pleasant to look into
her great, dreamy grey eyes, with their heavy lashes, at the broad
forehead and the clustering brown curls, and have her sit and look into
the fire and