d or the auction-block. With that mate she
went out, morning after morning to toil, as a common field-hand. As it
was _his_, so likewise was it her lot to wield the heavy hoe, or to
follow the plow, or to gather in the crops. She was a "hewer of wood and
a drawer of water." She was a common field-hand. She had to keep her
place in the gang from morn till eve, under the burden of a heavy task,
or under the stimulus or the fear of a cruel lash. She was a picker of
cotton. She labored at the sugar-mill and in the tobacco-factory. When,
through weariness or sickness, she has fallen behind her allotted task,
there came, as punishment, the fearful stripes upon her shrinking,
lacerated flesh.

Her home life was of the most degrading nature. She lived in the rudest
huts, and partook of the coarsest food, and dressed in the scantiest
garb, and slept, in multitudinous cabins, upon the hardest boards.

Thus she continued a beast of burden down to the period of those
maternal anxieties which, in ordinary civilized life, give repose,
quiet, and care to expectant mothers. But, under the slave system, few
such relaxations were allowed. And so it came to pass that little
children were ushered into this world under conditions which many
cattle-raisers would not suffer for their flocks or herds. Thus she
became the mother of children. But even then there was for her no
suretyship of motherhood, or training, or control. Her own offspring
were _not_ her own. She and husband and children were all the property
of others. All these sacred ties were constantly snapped and cruelly
sundered. _This_ year she had one husband; and next year, through some
auction sale, she might be separated from him and mated to another.
There was no sanctity of family, no binding tie of marriage, none of the
fine felicities and the endearing affections of home. None of these
things was the lot of Southern black women. Instead thereof, a gross
barbarism which tended to blunt the tender sensibilities, to obliterate
feminine delicacy and womanly shame, came down as her heritage from
generation to generation; and it seems a miracle of providence and grace
that, notwithstanding these terrible circumstances, so much struggling
virtue lingered amid these rude cabins, that so much womanly worth and
sweetness abided in their bosoms, as slave-holders themselves have borne
witness to.

But some of you will ask: "Why bring up these sad memories of the past?
Why distress us