"Among the slaves he owned was a beautiful quadroon, named Maggie, and an attachment sprang up between us. I loved her with all my heart, and she loved me as earnestly. White people, who think that the tender emotions are only for their own race, are much mistaken. I, who had the blood of two savage nations in my veins, loved as wildly, fiercely, and yet as tenderly as any white man that ever lived. Maggie loved me as fervently as I did her. The little education, I had picked up from my master in Missouri, made me the hero in the negro quarters. Oftentimes, in the balmy Southern nights, when the day's work was over, have I taken my banjo and sat by the side of my pretty quadroon, pretty to me, whatever she may have been to others, and played those old, long-forgotten songs. "Our overseer was hard on us, and the tasks we accomplished were wonderful--they seem impossible now for even negroes to have performed. Yet darkness never found me too tired to take my accustomed place by Maggie's side. When I was twenty-one, I was a strong, athletic man. No one on the plantation could equal me for strength or activity. Two or three times had the overseer tied me to a post and used his whip on me for some very trifling matter. On such occasions I felt the rising in my heart of that wild thirst for blood, which afterward proved my ruin. I was called 'Indian Jeff,' 'Proud Jeff,' and 'Dandy Jeff,' and the overseer, who seemed to have a special grudge against me, used to declare that he would whip the pride out of me. "I could have borne all their beatings and ill treatment, and have lived peaceably the life of a slave, until death or Abraham Lincoln's proclamation had set me free, had not my master given me a blow, that was worse than death. When I was twenty-one, Maggie and I were married, in sight of heaven, though the law said negroes can not marry, and were as happy as persons in perpetual bondage could be. She sympathized with me and I with her. I can not see now how we could have been so happy then. There was no promise in the future, but slavery, toil, and the lash. Our only hope of release was death, yet we were happy in each other's love. "We laughed at the threatened lash and sang at our work from morning until night. I toiled in the cotton fields, and Maggie was employed in the planter's mansion. It was cotton-picking time, a few months after our marriage, and, the crop being unusually large, my master sent my wife to work in the field. She came gladly and asked permission to work by my side. I also pleaded for this privilege, promising to do the work of two men, if our prayer was granted.