See our wretched family or individual arriving at the destined port, and then call to mind the abominations of the sale of a negro cargo. See the wretched individual or family exposed naked like brutes, and the same methods taken as with their fellow brutes, to ascertain whether or not their limbs and members are perfect. See them forced to jump or dance, to prove their agility; or, still more affecting, see them afraid, each lest the other only should be bought by some particular purchaser, and therefore displaying their agility, while their hearts are wrung with anguish, in order to induce the buyer to take them both. Perhaps the different branches of the family may be bought by different owners; they may probably be taken to different islands, and the poor hope of wearing away together the wretched remainder of their lives is disappointed; or, if they are purchased together, see them taken home to the estate, and entering upon their course of laborious and bitter degradation; while, looking forward to the future, not a single ray of hope breaks in to cheer the prospect, no hope of any alleviation of drudgery or degradation for them or for their children, for ever! Suppose our wretched Slave at length reduced to the level of his condition, and, either with his own family or with a new one, suppose him to have his hard lot in some little measure mitigated by a very slight taste of domestic and social comforts. It might well be thought, that, except for the hardships and sufferings inseparable from such a state of slavery, where even the necessaries of life must depend on an owner’s affluence, in a country where we know that an immense majority are extremely embarrassed in their affairs—the bitterness of death would be now past; but a negro Slave does not die so easily; again probably, possibly again and again, he is to be subjected to the brutalities of a sale, and to the pains of separation from all that are most dear to him.[57] He is taken perhaps to form a new settlement, and forced to the severe labour of clearing land, in a pestilential soil and climate, without any of those little accommodations which ingenious and industrious poverty might in a course of years have collected around him, in his old habitation. This, however, if a severe is still a short suffering, from which death soon releases him, and is far preferable to the sad fate of those, who linger out the tedious remainder of life, separated from all who have known them in their better days, and without any of those kindly props to lean upon, which the merciful ordainer of all things has provided, for sustaining the weakness, and mitigating the sorrows of age. To look around, and to see not a single face of friendship or relationship, no eye to cheer, no staff to lean upon; surely the comfortless close of such a Negro’s comfortless life, though not of equal intensity of suffering with many of the evils of the former scenes