When in Rochester a short time since, soliciting subscribers for this work, I stepped into a distillery and asked a man to subscribe for it.  He hesitated in his decision until he took a tumbler and filling it with brandy, invited me to drink.  I thanked him, saying I never drink brandy.  “Never drink!” he growled, “then I tell you, sir, that you stand a much better chance of being struck by lightning than of getting a subscriber here.”  Oh, very well; most likely had he agreed to take a copy, he would have been sorely displeased with my views of the liquor traffic, and perhaps with the compliment I have here paid him.

But in the foregoing remarks I have said but a tithe of what my heart feels, when I think of the sufferings occasioned by drunkenness.

Even the cup of the burthened slave, writhing in his chains and toiling under the lash, is not full of bitterness until the demon rum throws in its dregs and fills it to overflowing.

How often does it occur that a passionate master, heated with wine,—­mad with himself and all about him, pours out his vengeful ire on the head and back of some helpless slave, and leaves him weltering in his blood!  How often may be heard the agonized wail of the slave mother, deploring the departure of some innocent child that has been lost in gambling, while the master was intoxicated!

How often do the shrieks of the poor but virtuous slave girl, ring through the midnight air, as she, pleading for death rather than life, rushes screaming away from a brutal master, infuriated and drunk!  If it is a fact, and certainly it is, that the master is thus affected by his costly wine; what, think you, will be the temper and condition of the coarse and heartless overseer who drinks his miserable whisky or bad brandy?  It is horrible, beyond description.  I have often myself seen a drunken overseer, after pouring down dram after dram, mount his horse and ride furiously among the slaves, beating, bruising, mangling with his heavy cowhide every one he chanced to meet, until the ground presented the appearance of a battlefield.

CHAPTER XIX.

PERSECUTION OF THE COLORED PEOPLE.

While the colored population of New York were rejoicing in the measure of freedom allowed them by the more wholesome laws of that State, our brethren in Ohio were being oppressed and maltreated by the unjust and odious “black laws” of that professedly free State, enacted with special reference to the disposition of the colored race.

In Cincinnati, O., within sight of the slave land of Kentucky, a terrible persecution had commenced, and an effort was made to drive all colored persons from the place.