Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/467

Rh mangled, beaten, recaptured, fling himself into the water of the Black River, over which he was retaken into the power of his hard master. And the law was silent!

I beheld a young woman struck, for a hasty word, upon the temples, so that she dropped down dead! And the law was silent!

I heard the law, through its jury, adjudicate between a white man and a black, and sentence the latter to be flogged, when the former only was guilty. And they who were honest among the jurymen in vain opposed the verdict!

I beheld here, on the shore of the Mississippi, only a few months since, a young negro girl fly from the maltreatment of her master, and he a professor of religion, and fling herself into the river.

I saw multitudes of captives, men and women, condemned to labour early and late, deprived of every ray of that light which could give hope to captivity, and prevented from hearing the voice of the Saviour, which says, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden;” debarred from all this by men who call themselves Christians. But forgive me, my Agatha! Why should your eyes be tormented with these gloomy pictures? I would that I could avoid seeing them. But the effect of them will never leave me. There was an end of all my enjoyment of the air and the beauty of the South. I seemed to hate my own kind who could perpetrate such cruelties and such injustice. I hated those who could gloss all this over for the interests of trade. I was indignant with myself for having wished to spare myself, to blind myself, to what I must have known would be the inevitable consequences of the institution of slavery. Yes, I ought to have known it; but I thought that it now no longer could be so!

Georgia and Carolina have, however, allowed the introduction of Christianity among the slaves. I had