rrounded by their family, relatives and friends;
to-morrow, they may be scattered, parted forever. The master's
circumstances, not their own, may have assigned one to the dreadful
slave-pen, and another to the distant rice-swamp; and it is this continual
dread of some perilous future that holds in check every joyous emotion,
every lofty aspiration, of the most favored slave at the South. They know
that their owners indulge in high living, and they are well aware also
that their continual indulgences engender disease, which make them very
liable to sudden death; or their master may be killed in a duel, or at a
horse-race, or in a drunken brawl; then his creditors are active in
looking after the estate; and next, the blow of the auctioneer's hammer
separates them perhaps for life.

Now, after the lapse of so many years, when my thoughts wander back, as
they often do, to my native State, I confess that painful recollections
drive from my mind those joyful emotions that should ever arise in the
heart of man, when contemplating the familiar scenes of his youth, and
especially when recurring to the venerable shades and the sheltering roof
under which he was born. True, around the well-remembered spot where our
childhood's years were spent, recollection still loves to linger; yet
memory, ever ready with its garnered store, paints in glowing colors,
Virginia's crouching slaves in the foreground. Her loathsome slave-pens
and slave markets--chains, whips and instruments of torture; and back of
all this is as truthfully recorded the certain doom, the retributive
justice, that will sooner or later overtake her; and with a despairing
sigh I turn away from the imaginary view of my native State.

What though she may have been justly styled, "The Mother of Presidents?"
What avails the honor of being the birth-place of the brave and excellent
Washington, while the prayers and groans of the down-trodden African
daily ascend to heaven for redress? What though her soil be fertile,
yielding a yearly product of wealth to its possessors? And what matter is
it, that their lordly mansions are embowered in the shade of trees of a
century's growth, if, through their lofty and tangled branches, we espy
the rough cabin of the mangled bondman, and know that the soil on which he
labors has drunk his heart's blood?

Ah! to me, life's sweetest memories are all embittered. Slavery had cast
its dark and fearful shadow over my childhood, youth, and early