of
the planter is not distinctly recollected, but it can be known by a
inspection of the record of the trial in the clerk's office,
Frederick.

"A minister of Virginia, still living, and whose name must not be
mentioned for fear of Nero Preston and his confederate-hanging
myrmidons, informed me of this fact in 1815, in his own house. 'A
member of my church, said he, lately whipped a colored youth to death.
What shall I do?' I answered, 'I hope you do not mean to continue him
in your church.' That minister replied, 'How can we help it'
We dare not call him to an account. We have no legal testimony.'
Their communion season was then approaching. I addressed his
wife,--'Mrs. ---- do you mean to sit at the Lord's table with that
murderer?'--,'Not I,' she answered: 'I would as soon commune with the
devil himself.' The slave killer was equally unnoticed by the civil
and ecclesiastical authority.

"John Baxter, a Presbyterian elder, the brother of that slaveholding
doctor in divinity, George A. Baxter, held as a slave the wife of a
Baptist colored preacher, familiarly called 'Uncle Jack.' In a late
period of pregnancy he scourged her so that the lives of herself and
her unborn child were considered in jeopardy. Uncle Jack was advised
to obtain the liberation of his wife. Baxter finally agreed, I think,
to sell the woman and her children, three of them, I believe for six
hundred dollars, and an additional hundred if the unborn child
survived a certain period after its birth. Uncle Jack was to pay one
hundred dollars per annum for his wife and children for seven years,
and Baxter held a sort of mortgage upon them for the payment. Uncle
Jack showed me his back in furrows like a ploughed field. His master
used to whip up the flesh, then beat it downwards, and then apply the
'negro plaster,' salt, pepper, mustard, and vinegar, until all Jack's
back was almost as hard and unimpressible as the bones. There is
slaveholding religion! A Presbyterian elder receiving from a Baptist
preacher seven hundred dollars for his wife and children. James Kyle
and uncle Jack used to tell that story with great Christian
sensibility; and uncle Jack would weep tears of anguish over his
wife's piteous tale, and tears of ecstasy at the same moment that he
was free, and that soon, by the grace of God, his wife and children,
as he said, 'would be all free together.'"

Rev. JAMES NOURSE, a Presbyterian clergyman of Mifflia co. Penn.,
whose father is, we