ust be stripped of their respectability and Christian reputation.
They must be treated as "men-stealers--guilty of the highest
kind of theft, and sinners of the first rank." Their more guilty
accomplices in the persons of _northern apologists_, both in Church and
State, must be placed in the same category. Honest men must be made to
look upon their crimes with the same abhorrence and loathing, with
which they regard the less guilty robber and assassin, until

"The common damned shun their society,
And look upon themselves as fiends less foul."

When a just estimate is placed upon the crime of slave-holding, the work
will have been accomplished, and the glorious day ushered in--

"When man nor woman in all our wide domain,
Shall buy, or sell, or hold, or be a slave."

J.C. Hathaway.

--Farmington, N.Y., 1847.

NARRATIVE.

CHAPTER I.

I was born in Lexington, Ky. The man who stole me as soon as I was born,
recorded the births of all the infants which he claimed to be born his
property, in a book which he kept for that purpose. My mother's name was
Elizabeth. She had seven children, viz: Solomon, Leander, Benjamin,
Joseph, Millford, Elizabeth, and myself. No two of us were children of
the same father. My father's name, as I learned from my mother, was
George Higgins. He was a white man, a relative of my master, and
connected with some of the first families in Kentucky.

My master owned about forty slaves, twenty-five of whom were field
hands. He removed from Kentucky to Missouri, when I was quite young, and
settled thirty or forty miles above St. Charles, on the Missouri, where,
in addition to his practice as a physician, he carried on milling,
merchandizing and farming. He had a large farm, the principal
productions of which were tobacco and hemp. The slave cabins were
situated on the back part of the farm, with the house of the overseer,
whose name was Grove Cook, in their midst. He had the entire charge of
the farm, and having no family, was allowed a woman to keep house for
him, whose business it was to deal out the provisions for the hands.

A woman was also kept at the quarters to do the cooking for the field
hands, who were summoned to their unrequited toil every morning at four
o'clock, by the ringing of a bell, hung on a post near the house of the
overseer. They were allowed half an hour to eat their breakfast, and get
to the field. At half past four, a horn was blown by t