Viewing page 177 of 208

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

348 THE INJURED AFRICANS.

her liberty for seventy dollars. She is seriously disposed, but not a professor of religion.

4. "He has now eight brother and sisters living in Frankfort, Franklin county, Kentucky, all slaves, and all, excepting one, members of a Baptist church in that place. About a year after his con version, Reuben was married to a slave, who had been kidnapped in Maryland, and sold to a planter in his neighborhood. She was also hopefully pious.

5. "While they lived together, she became the mother of two children; but about four years after their marriage, she and one of the children, aged eight months, were sold without his knowledge, and transported to a distant Spanish territory, and with so much secrecy, that he had no opportunity even to bid her a last farewell. 'This,' said he, 'was the severest trial of my life, a sense of sin only excepted. I mourned and cried, and would not be comforted.

6. "'After several months, however, the hope of meeting her and my children again in the kingdom of God, when we should never be separated, together with a promise from my master that I should at some future time go to see her, in some measure allayed my grief, and permitted me to enjoy the consolations of religion.' The other child is now a slave in Kentucky, though the father has often endeavored in vain to purchase his freedom.

7. "About six years since, having hired his time

THE INJURED AFRICANS. 319

of his master for five years previous, at 120 dollars a year, Reuben succeeded, by trafficking in rags, and in other ways, collecting a sum sufficient for the purchase of his own freedom, for which he paid 700 dollars, and not only so, but he was enabled, with his surplus earnings, to build a brick house, and to provide it with convenient accommodations. By the dishonesty of his former master, however, all was taken from him.

8. "Thus stripped of his property, he left Kentucky and went to New Orleans, that he might learn something from his wife, and, if possible, find and redeem her; but he only succeeded in gaining the painful intelligence that she was dead. He there formed an acquaintance with his present wife, whose former name was Betsey Bond, and they were soon married. The circumstances of her life were briefly these:--

9. "Betsey was born a slave, near Hobb's Hole, Essex county, Virginia, about 1763, and was married to a slave at about the age of twenty years. By him she had three children, one of which, together with her husband, died a few years after their marriage. Soon after their death, she was led to reflect on her lost state as a sinner, and after about seven months of deep anxiety, was enabled, as she trusts, to resign herself into the hands of her Saviour, and experience those consolations which he deigns to grant tot eh broken-hearted penitent.