CHAPTER I.
Something over twenty years ago, I stopped a few days at the City Hotel in Wheeling, Va. The hotel was located on the southern border of the city, adjoining a small plantation in the rear of the garden. The landlord was a pleasant, social gentleman, well informed on all topics of interest, and preferred hiring his help rather than be the owner of a human being. Having learned this, I was less guarded in talking about their institutions than I should otherwise have been. Among the guests at the hotel was a family of Quakers on their way from Eastern Virginia to Indiana. One of the young men told me that he had never been outside of the State of Virginia; had long been disgusted with the wickedness and cruelty of slavery which he could not avoid seeing and hearing every day. The horrors of the everyday life on the plantations as described by him exceeded everything related in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and he had sold out, and the family were going to settle in a free State.
I was sitting on the piazza talking with this man, when a coffle of slaves came in front of the house and were hustled along by the driver; the men were fine looking fellows, though they were bare-footed, and most of them bare-headed; they were chained by the right
