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We were all ranked together at the valuation. Menand women, old and young, married and single, wereranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There werehorses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being,and were all subjected to the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth, maidsand matrons, had to undergo the same indelicateinspection. At this moment, I saw more clearly thanever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon bothslave and slaveholder.
After the valuation, then came the division. I haveno language to express the high excitement and deepanxiety which were felt among us poor slaves duringthis time. Our fate for life was now to be decided.we had no more voice in that decision than thebrutes among whom we were ranked. A single wordfrom the white men was enough--against all ourwishes, prayers, and entreaties--to sunder forever thedearest friends, dearest kindred, and strongest tiesknown to human beings. In addition to the pain ofseparation, there was the horrid dread of falling intothe hands of Master Andrew. He was known to usall as being a most cruel wretch,--a common drunkard, who had, by his reckless mismanagement andprofligate dissipation, already wasted a large portion of his father's property. We all felt that wemight as well be sold at once to the Georgia traders,as to pass into his hands; for we knew that thatwould be our inevitable condition,--a condition heldby us all in the utmost horror and dread.
I suffered more anxiety than most of my fellowslaves. I had known what it was to be kindly treated;they had known nothing of the kind. They had seenlittle or nothing of the world. They were in verydeed men and women of sorrow, and acquainted withgrief. Their backs had been made familiar with thebloody lash, so that they had become callous; minewas yet tender; for while at Baltimore I got few whippings, and few slaves could boast of a kinder masterand mistress than myself; and the thought of passing out of their hands into those of Master Andrew-a man who, but a few days before, to give me asample of his bloody disposition, took my littlebrother by the throat, threw him on the ground, andwith the heel of his boot stamped upon his headtill the blood gushed from his nose and ears--waswell calculated to make me anxious as to my fate.After he had committed this savage outrage uponmy brother, he turned to me, and said that was theway he meant to serve me one of these days,--meaning, I suppose, when I came into his possession.
Thanks to a kind Providence, I fell to the portionof Mrs. Lucretia, and was sent immediately backto Baltimore, to live again in the family of MasterHugh. Their joy at my return equalled their sorrowat my departure. It was a glad day to me. I hadescaped a worse than lion's jaws. I was absent fromBaltimore, for the purpose of valuation and division,just about one month, and it seemed to have beensix.
Very soon after my return to Baltimore, my mistress, Lucretia, died, leaving her husband and onechild, Amanda; and in a very short time after herdeath, Master Andrew died. Now all the propertyof my old master, slaves included, was in the handsof strangers,--strangers who had had nothing to dowith accumulating it. Not a slave was left free. Allremained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest. Ifany one thing in my experience, more than another,served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with unutterableloathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother. She had servedmy old master faithfully from youth to old age. Shehad been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become agreat grandmother in his service. She had rockedhim in infancy, attended him in childhood, servedhim through life, and at his death wiped from hisicy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyesforever. She was nevertheless left a slave--a slave forlife--a slave in the hands of strangers; and in theirhands she saw her children, her grandchildren, andher great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep,without being gratified with the small privilege of asingle word, as to their or her own destiny. And, tocap the climax of their base ingratitude and fiendishbarbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old,having outlived my old master and all his children,having seen the beginning and end of all of them,and her present owners finding she was of but littlevalue, her frame already racked with the pains of oldage, and complete helplessness fast stealing over heronce active limbs, they took her to the woods, builther a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, andthen made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtuallyturning her out to die! If my poor old grandmothernow lives, she lives to suffer in utter loneliness; shelives to remember and mourn over the loss of children, the loss of grandchildren, and the loss of greatgrandchildren. They are, in the language of theslave's poet, Whittier,--
"Gone, gone, sold and gone
To the rice swamp dank and lone,
Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings,
Where the noisome insect stings,
Where the fever-demon strews
Poison with the falling dews,
Where the sickly sunbeams glare
Through the hot and misty air:--
Gone, gone, sold and gone
To the rice swamp dank and lone,
From Virginia hills and waters--
Woe is me, my stolen daughters!"
The hearth is desolate. The children, the unconscious children, who once sang and danced in herpresence, are gone. She gropes her way, in the darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voicesof her children, she hears by day the moans of thedove, and by night the screams of the hideous owl.All is gloom. The grave is at the door. And now,when weighed down by the pains and aches of oldage, when the head inclines to the feet, when thebeginning and ending of human existence meet, andhelpless infancy and painful old age combine together--at this time, this most needful time, the timefor the exercise of that tenderness and affectionwhich children only can exercise towards a decliningparent--my poor old grandmother, the devotedmother of twelve children, is left all alone, in yonderlittle hut, before a few dim embers. She stands-she sits--she staggers--she falls--she groans--she dies--and there are none of her children or grandchildrenpresent, to wipe from her wrinkled brow the coldsweat of death, or to place beneath the sod herfallen remains. Will not a righteous God visit forthese things?
In about two years after the death of Mrs. Lucretia, Master Thomas married his second wife. Hername was Rowena Hamilton. She was the eldestdaughter of Mr. William Hamilton. Master nowlived in St. Michael's. Not long after his marriage,a misunderstanding took place between himself andMaster Hugh; and as a means of punishing hisbrother, he took me from him to live with himselfat St. Michael's. Here I underwent another mostpainful separation. It, however, was not so severeas the one I dreaded at the division of property; for,during this interval, a great change had taken placein Master Hugh and his once kind and affectionatewife. The influence of brandy upon him, and ofslavery upon her, had effected a disastrous changein the characters of both; so that, as far as theywere concerned, I thought I had little to lose by thechange. But it was not to them that I was attached.It was to those little Baltimore boys that I felt thestrongest attachment. I had received many goodlessons from them, and was still receiving them, andthe thought of leaving them was painful indeed. Iwas leaving, too, without the hope of ever beingallowed to return. Master Thomas had said he wouldnever let me return again. The barrier betwixt himself and brother he considered impassable.
I then had to regret that I did not at least makethe attempt to carry out my resolution to run away;for the chances of success are tenfold greater fromthe city than from the country.
I sailed from Baltimore for St. Michael's in thesloop Amanda, Captain Edward Dodson. On mypassage, I paid particular attention to the directionwhich the steamboats took to go to Philadelphia. Ifound, instead of going down, on reaching NorthPoint they went up the bay, in a north-easterly direction. I deemed this knowledge of the utmost importance. My determination to run away was againrevived. I resolved to wait only so long as the offeringof a favorable opportunity. When that came, I wasdetermined to be off.
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