he gashes stuffed with salt! after which she was tied to a
post in a cellar, where, after suffering three days, death kindly
terminated her misery. This fact was communicated at Washington, by the
same gentleman above mentioned.[14]

[Illustration: Paragraph 50.

Barbarity committed on a free African, who was found on the ensuing
morning, by the side of the road, dead!]

50. As two persons were returning from the _horse races_, a few miles
north of the city of Washington, eight or ten years ago, they met on the
road a free man of colour, who resided in the vicinity. They seized him,
and bound him with ropes. His protestations that he was free, and his
entreaties that they would accompany him to the house, (but about half a
mile distant,) where his wife resided, and where he could satisfy them
of his freedom, were in vain. Having fastened him by a rope, to the tail
of one of their horses, they were seen, by a citizen, who met them on
the road dragging him in this manner, and beating him to make him keep
pace with the horses. He cautioned them, and begged of them not to kill
the black man;--but one of the ruffians plucking a stake from the fence,
and threatening with horrid oaths to knock him down, he found it
necessary to retire for his own safety:--a few miles farther along, on
the following morning, this poor African was found by the side of the
road, dreadfully bruised, and his eyes bloodshotten,--dead![15] This
distressing catastrophe strongly exemplifies the defect of the laws of
the state in which it occurred, concerning free Africans, which
authorise their seizure, without any specific judicial authority, if
found without certificates of freedom, by the most vicious and abandoned
members of the community. These two ill-starred wretches, just sallying
forth from a notorious school of intemperance, were undoubtedly
intoxicated, and of course, in a state of insanity at the time they
committed this outrage;--and had probably been reared in the
_wilderness_ of ignorance and vice. I was assured, that one of them had
long been accustomed, in company with his _own father_, to the business
of apprehending runaway slaves, and such free Africans as they could
catch without certificates.

51. In the vicinity of the place where the above transaction occurred, a
young black boy, living at a house in which there are just grounds for
believing that the lives of several slaves had been destroyed, by
whipping, and other severit