After I growed up to ten years old they made me sleep out in an old house standing off some distance from the main house where my master and mistress lived.  A bed of straw and old rags was made for me in a big trough called the tan trough (a trough having been used for tanning purposes).  The cats about the place came and slept with me, and was all the company I had.  I had to work with the hoe in the field and help do everything in doors and out in all weathers.  The place was so poor that some seasons he would not raise twenty bushels of corn and hardly three bushels of wheat.  As for shoes I never knowed what it was to have a pair of shoes until I was grown up.  After I growed up to be a woman my master thought nothing of taking my clothes off, and would whip me until the blood would run down to the ground.  After I was twenty-five years old they did not treat me so bad; they both professed to get religion about that time; and my master said he would never lay the weight of his finger on me again.  Once after that mistress wanted him to whip me, but he didn’t do it, nor never whipped me any more.  After awhile my master died; if they had gone according to law I would have been hired out or sold, but my mistress wanted to keep me to carry on the place for her support.  So I was kept for seven or eight years after his death.  It was understood between my mistress, and her children, and her friends, who all met after master died, that I was to take care of mistress, and after mistress died I should not serve anybody else.  I done my best to keep my mistress from suffering.  After a few years they all became dissatisfied, and moved to Missouri.  They scattered, and took up government land.  Without means they lived as poor people commonly live, on small farms in the woods.  I still lived with my mistress.  Some of the heirs got dissatisfied, and sued for their rights or a settlement; then I was sold with my child, a boy.”

Thus Aunt Hannah reviewed her slave-life, showing that she had been in the hands of six different owners, and had seen great tribulation under each of them, except the last; that she had never known a mother’s or a father’s care; that Slavery had given her one child, but no husband as a protector or a father.  The half of what she passed through in the way of suffering has scarcely been hinted at in this sketch.  Fifty-seven years were passed in bondage before she reached Philadelphia.  Under the good Providence through which she came in possession of her freedom, she found a kind home with a family of Abolitionists, (Mrs. Gillingham’s), whose hearts had been in deep sympathy with the slave for many years.  In this situation Aunt Hannah remained several years, honest, faithful, and obliging, taking care of her earnings, which were put out at interest for her by her friends.  Her mind was deeply imbued with religious feeling, and an unshaken confidence in God as her only trust; she connected herself with the A.M.E.  Bethel Church, of Philadelphia, where she has walked,