“WILLIAM ROBERTS.”

“Fifty dollars reward—­Ran away from the subscriber a Negro girl named Maria.  She is of a copper color, between thirteen and fourteen years of age—­bareheaded and barefooted.  She is small for her age—­very sprightly and very likely.  She stated she was going to see her mother at Maysville.

     “SANFORD THOMSON.”

“Fifty dollars reward—­Ran away from the subscriber his Negro man Pauladore, commonly called Paul.  I understand General R.Y.  Hayne has purchased his wife and children from H.L.  Pinckney, Esq., and has them now on his plantation at Goose Creek, where, no doubt, the fellow is frequently lurking.

     “T.  DAVIS.”

The Presbyterian synod of Kentucky said to the churches under its care in 1835:  “Brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and wives, are torn asunder and permitted to see each other no more.  These acts are daily occurring in the midst of us.  The shrieks and agony often witnessed on such occasions proclaim, with a trumpet tongue, the iniquity of our system.  There is not a neighborhood where these heartrending scenes are not displayed.  There is not a village or road that does not behold the sad procession of manacled outcasts whose mournful countenances tell that they are exiled by force from all that their hearts hold dear.”

A sister of a president of the United States declared:  “We Southern ladies are complimented with the names of wives, but we are only the mistresses of seraglios.”

Out of this, what sort of black women could be born into the world of today?  There are those who hasten to answer this query in scathing terms and who say lightly and repeatedly that out of black slavery came nothing decent in womanhood; that adultery and uncleanness were their heritage and are their continued portion.

Fortunately so exaggerated a charge is humanly impossible of truth.  The half-million women of Negro descent who lived at the beginning of the 19th century had become the mothers of two and one-fourth million daughters at the time of the Civil War and five million grand-daughters in 1910.  Can all these women be vile and the hunted race continue to grow in wealth and character?  Impossible.  Yet to save from the past the shreds and vestiges of self-respect has been a terrible task.  I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.

Alexander Crummell once said of his sister in the blood:  “In her girlhood all the delicate tenderness of her sex has been rudely outraged.  In the field, in the rude cabin, in the press-room, in the factory she was thrown into the companionship of coarse and ignorant men.  No chance was given her for delicate reserve or tender modesty.  From her childhood she was the doomed victim of the grossest passion.  All the virtues of her sex were utterly ignored.  If the instinct of chastity asserted