of a slave improper and impertinent, and evidence
of a restless spirit.  The nearest estimate I can give
makes me now between twenty-seven and twenty-
eight years of age.  I come to this, from hearing my
master say, some time during 1835, I was about
seventeen years old.

 

  My mother was named Harriet Bailey.  She was
the daughter of Isaac and Betsey Bailey, both col-
ored, and quite dark.  My mother was of a darker
complexion than either my grandmother or grand-
father.

 

  My father was a white man.  He was admitted to
be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage.
The opinion was also whispered that my master was
my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I
know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld
from me.  My mother and I were separated when I
was but an infant--before I knew her as my mother.
It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland
from which I ran away, to part children from their
mothers at a very early age.  Frequently, before the
child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is
taken from it, and hired out on some farm a con-
siderable distance off, and the child is placed under
the care of an old woman, too old for field labor.
For what this separation is done, I do not know,
unless it be to hinder the development of the child's
affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy
the natural affection of the mother for the child.
This is the inevitable result.

 

  I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more
than four or five times in my life; and each of these
times was very short in duration, and at night.  She
was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve
miles from my home.  She made her journeys to see
me in the night, travelling the whole distance on
foot, after the performance of her day's work.  She
was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of
not being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has
special permission from his or her master to the con-
trary--a permission which they seldom get, and one
that gives to him that gives it the proud name of
being a kind master.  I do not recollect of ever seeing
my mother by the light of day.  She was with me in
the night.  She would lie down with me, and get me
to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.  Very
little communication ever took place between us.
Death soon ended what little we could have while
she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering.
She died when I was about seven years old, on one
of my master's farms, near Lee's Mill.  I was not al-
lowed to be present during her illness, at her death,
or burial.  She was gone long before I knew any thing
about it.  Never having enjoyed, to any considerable
extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watch-
ful care, I received the tidings of her death with
much the same emotions I should have probably
felt at the death of a stranger.

 

  Called thus suddenly away, she left me without
the slightest intimation of who my father was.  The
whisper that my master was my father, may or may
not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little con-
sequence to my purpose whilst the fact remains,
in all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have
ordained, and by law established, that the children
of slave women shall in all cases follow the condi-
tion of their mothers; and this is done too obviously
to administer to their own lusts, and make a grati-
fication of their wicked desires profitable as well as
pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the
slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves
the double relation of master and father.

 

  I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark
that such slaves invariably suffer greater hardships,
and have more to contend with, than others.  They
are, in the first place, a constant offence to their
mistress.  She is ever disposed to find fault with them;
they can seldom do any thing to please her; she is
never better pleased than when she sees them under
the lash, especially when she suspects her husband
of showing to his mulatto children favors which he
withholds from his black slaves.  The master is fre-
quently compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out
of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and,
cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a