“William Wilson, a Presbyterian preacher of Augusta county, Virginia, had a young colored girl who was constitutionally unhealthy.  As no means to amend her were availing, he sold her to a member of his congregation, and in the usual style of human flesh dealers, warranted her ‘sound,’ &c.  The fraud was instantly discovered; but he would not refund the amount.  A suit was commenced, and was long continued, and finally the plaintiff recovered the money out of which he had been swindled by slave-trading with his own preacher.  No Presbytery censured him, although Judge Brown, the chancellor, severely condemned the imposition.

“In the year 1811, Johab Graham, a preacher, lived with Alexander Nelson a Presbyterian elder, near Stanton, Virginia, and he informed me that a man had appeared before Nelson, who was a magistrate, and swore falsely against his slave,—­that the elder ordered him thirty-nine lashes.  All that wickedness was done as an excuse for his dissipated owner to obtain money.  A negro trader had offered him a considerable sum for the ‘boy,’ and under the pretence of saving him from the punishment of the law, he was trafficked away from his woman and children to another state.  The magistrate was aware of the perjury, and the whole abomination, but all the truth uttered by every colored person in the southern states would not be of any avail against the notorious false swearing of the greatest white villain who ever cursed the world.  ‘How,’ said Johab Graham, can I preach to-morrow?’ I replied, ’Very well; go and thunder the doctrine of retribution in their ears, Obadiah 15, till by the divine blessing you kill or cure them.  My friends, John M. Nelson of Hillsborough, Ohio, Samuel Linn, and Robert Herron, and others of the same vicinity, could ‘make both the ears of every one who heareth them tingle’ with the accounts which they can give of slave-driving by professors of religion in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia.

“In 1815, near Frederick, in Maryland, a most barbarous planter was killed in a fit of desperation, by four of his slaves in self-defence.  It was declared by those slaves while in prison that, besides his atrocities among their female associates, he had deliberately butchered a number of his slaves.  The four men were murdered by law, to appease the popular clamor.  I saw them executed on the twenty-eighth day of Jan’y, 1816.  The facts I received from the Rev. Patrick Davidson of Frederick, who constantly visited them during their imprisonment—­and who became an abolitionist in consequence of the disclosures which he heard from those men in the jail.  The name 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.