When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.

I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.