Page:Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave.djvu/396

394 I was again reduced to the condition of a common field slave, on a cotton plantation in Georgia, and compelled to subsist on the very scanty and coarse food allowed to the southern slave. I had been absent from Georgia almost twenty years, and in that period great changes had doubtlessly taken place in the face of the country, as well as in the condition of human society.

I had never been in Milledgeville until I was brought there by the man who had kidnapped me in Maryland, and I was now a slave among entire strangers, and had no friend to give me the consolation of kind words, such as I had formerly received from my master in Morgan county. The plantation on which I was now a slave, had formerly belonged to the father of my mistress; and some of my fellow slaves had been well acquainted with her in her youth. From these people I learned, that after the death of my master, and my flight from Georgia, my mistress had become the wife of a second husband, who had removed with her to the State of Louisiana more than fifteen years ago.

After ascertaining these facts, which proved beyond all doubt that my present master had no right whatsoever to me, in either law or justice, I determined that before encountering the dangers and sufferings that must necessarily attend my second flight from Georgia, I would attempt to proclaim the