Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/406

 river. On our way we passed through the slave-market. Forty or fifty young persons of both sexes were walking up and down before the house in expectation of purchasers. They were singing; they seemed cheerful and thoughtless. The young slaves who were here offered for sale were from twelve to twenty years of age; there was one little boy, however, who was only six; he belonged to no one there. He attached himself to the slave-keeper. Poor little fellow! Who was his mother? Who his sister or his brother? Many of these children were fair mulattoes, and some of them very pretty. One young girl of twelve was so white that I should have supposed her to belong to the white race; her features too were also those of the whites. The slave-keeper told us that the day before, another girl still fairer and handsomer, had been sold for fifteen hundred dollars. These white children of slavery become, for the most part, victims of crime, and sink into the deepest degradation. Yet again,—what heathenism in the midst of a Christian land!

The greater number of these young slaves were from Virginia, which not needing much slave-labour itself, sells its slaves down south. Some gentlemen were on the spot, and one or two of them called my attention to the cheerful looks of the young people.

“All the more sorrowful is their condition,” thought I, “the highest degradation is not to feel it!”

But from this shame-spot in the young and beautiful state of Georgia, I turn my glance with pleasure to another spot, one rich in honour and hope—that so-called “Liberty-County;” and it was a great loss to me not to have been able to visit this, the oldest home of liberty in the state of Georgia. Here began the first movement in the south for American freedom. “The Liberty-Boys” originated here; and here it was that, still later, commenced the first effectual movements for the instruction of the negroes in Christianity, for their