American Slave Trade [Illustrated]

by Jesse Torrey

Overview

This edition features
• illustrations
• linked Footnotes

American Slave Trade; OR, An Account of the Manner in Which the Slave Dealers Take Free People from Some of the United States of America, and Carry Them Away, and Sell Them as Slaves in Other of the States; and of the Horrible Cruelties Practised in the Carrying on of This Most Infamous Traffic: With Reflections on the Project for Forming a Colony of American Blacks in Africa, and Certain Documents Respecting that Project.

Excerpt
While at a public house, in Fredericktown, there came into the bar-room (on Sunday)[Pg 25] a decently dressed white man, of quite a light complexion, in company with one who was totally black. After they went away, the landlord observed that the white man was a slave. I asked him, with some surprise, how that could be possible? To which he replied, that he was a descendant, by female ancestry, of an African slave. He also stated, that not far from Fredericktown, there was a slave estate, on which there were several white females of as fair and elegant appearance as white ladies in general, held in legal bondage as slaves. These facts demonstrate that the peculiar hue, with which it has pleased God to paint the surface of the body of an African, is not the only circumstance which reconciles to the conscience of the European, (white man) the act of depriving him of his liberty and the fruits of his labour. Hence it appears to be a melancholy truth, that man, in a morbid state of intellect, (which I consider to be the case with every individual, whose rule[Pg 26] of action is not founded upon wisdom and virtue,) voluntarily and almost invariably, confounds right with might, and when stimulated by avarice, frequently hesitates not to bind and sell his wife, his children, or his brother! I have received direct information from a gentleman who witnessed the fact, that in one of the slave states, a white man, having married one of his female slaves, after she had borne him several children, sold the whole of them together as he would a drove of cattle; and it is said such instances are frequent. A gentleman brought with him from the southward to Philadelphia, (the city of brotherly love,) his half brother, the son of his father by a slave, and attempted to sell him! He was happily prevented from executing his sacrilegious design by the interposition of a respectable citizen, who also procured the legal restoration of freedom to the darker faced brother.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013829244
Publisher:	VolumesOfValue
Publication date:	12/10/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	398 KB