Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/485

 In Witness whereof, I have here unto signed my name, on this sixteenth day of December, one thousand eight hundred twenty-one. (Signed)

Witness, (Signed)
 * , X his mark.

, X his mark.

We promise to present to Charles Carey, one Coat.

The Fifth Annual Report of the American Colonization Society, pp. 64-66.

A black man, has been a member of this Colony since the beginning of the year 1820. He made a profession of religion in America: but never never since I knew him, either discharged its duties, or evinced much of its spirit, till within the last ten months. He was a man of good natural sense, but wretched in the extreme; and the cause of equal wretchedness to his young family. His wife, naturally of a mild and placid temper, failed in almost every thing to please him, or prevent the constant outbreaking of his morose and peevish humor. He was her tyrant and so instinct with malevolence, the vain conceit of superiority, jealousy, and obstinate pride, as to resemble more an Arab of the desert, or a person destitute of natural affection, than a person by education and in name, a Christian. As a neighbor, his feelings were so soured and narrow, as to render him disobliging, suspicious, and equally an object of general dislike and neglect. His heart was a moral desert no kind affection seemed to stir within it; and the bitter streams which it discharged had spread a moral desolation around him, and left him the solitary victim of his own corroding temper.

Such an ascendant had these evil qualities over the other faculties of his mind as in a great measure to dim the light of reason, and render him as a subject of the colonial government, no less perverse and untractable, than he was debased and wretched, as a man.

Several times have the laws, which guard the peace of our little community, been called in, to check the excesses of his turbulent passions, by supplying the weakness of more ingenuous motives. Still