Barbarity committed on a free African, who was found on the ensuing morning, by the side of the road, dead!] 50. As two persons were returning from the _horse races_, a few miles north of the city of Washington, eight or ten years ago, they met on the road a free man of colour, who resided in the vicinity. They seized him, and bound him with ropes. His protestations that he was free, and his entreaties that they would accompany him to the house, (but about half a mile distant,) where his wife resided, and where he could satisfy them of his freedom, were in vain. Having fastened him by a rope, to the tail of one of their horses, they were seen, by a citizen, who met them on the road dragging him in this manner, and beating him to make him keep pace with the horses. He cautioned them, and begged of them not to kill the black man;--but one of the ruffians plucking a stake from the fence, and threatening with horrid oaths to knock him down, he found it necessary to retire for his own safety:--a few miles farther along, on the following morning, this poor African was found by the side of the road, dreadfully bruised, and his eyes bloodshotten,--dead![15] This distressing catastrophe strongly exemplifies the defect of the laws of the state in which it occurred, concerning free Africans, which authorise their seizure, without any specific judicial authority, if found without certificates of freedom, by the most vicious and abandoned members of the community. These two ill-starred wretches, just sallying forth from a notorious school of intemperance, were undoubtedly intoxicated, and of course, in a state of insanity at the time they committed this outrage;--and had probably been reared in the _wilderness_ of ignorance and vice. I was assured, that one of them had long been accustomed, in company with his _own father_, to the business of apprehending runaway slaves, and such free Africans as they could catch without certificates. 51. In the vicinity of the place where the above transaction occurred, a young black boy, living at a house in which there are just grounds for believing that the lives of several slaves had been destroyed, by whipping, and other severities, yet entertained such horror at the thoughts of transportation to Georgia, (with which he had often been threatened, by way of reprimand,[16]) that on seeing a stranger coming towards the house, (on a cold day,) whom he suspected to be a _Georgia-man_, he fled into the fields with the greatest precipitation, and secreted himself so effectually, that he was not discovered until the expiration of a fortnight,--when he was dead!--frozen!--and the pupils of his eyes picked out!