My father owned a woman, (we used to call aunt Grace,) she was purchased in Old Virginia. She has told me that her old master, in his _will_, gave her her freedom, but at his death, his sons had sold her to my father: when he bought her she manifested some unwillingness to go with him, when she was put in irons and taken by force. This was before I was born; but I remember to have seen the irons, and was told that was what they had been used for. Aunt Grace is still living, and must be between seventy and eighty years of age; she has, for the last forty years, been an exemplary Christian. When I was a youth I took some pains to learn her to read; this is now a great consolation to her. Since age and infirmity have rendered her of little value to her "owners," she is permitted to read as much as she pleases; this she can do, with the aid of glasses, in the old family Bible, which is almost the only book she has ever looked into. This with some little mending for the black children, is all she does; she is still held as a slave. I well remember what a _heart-rending scene_ there was in the family when _my father sold her husband_; this was, I suppose, thirty-five years ago. And yet my father was considered one of the best of masters. I know of few who were better, but of _many_ who were worse. The last time I saw my father, which was in the fall of 1832, he promised me that he would free all his slaves at his death. He died however without doing it; and I have understood since, that he omitted it, through the influence of Rev. Dr. Speece, a Presbyterian minister, who lived in the family, and was a _warm friend of the Colonization Society_. About the year 1809 or 10, I became a student of Rev. George Bourne; he was the first abolitionist I had ever seen, and the first I had ever heard pray or plead for the oppressed, which gave me the first misgivings about the _innocence_ of slaveholding. I received impressions from Mr. Bourne which I could not get rid of,[6] and determined in my own mind that when I settled in life, it should be in a free state; this determination I carried into effect in 1813, when I removed to this place, which I supposed at that time, to be all the opposition to slavery that was necessary, but the moment I became convinced that all slaveholding was in itself _sinful_, I became an abolitionist, which was about four years ago. [Footnote 6: Mr. Bourne resided seven years in Virginia, "in perils among false brethren; fiercely persecuted for his faithful testimony against slavery. More than twenty years since he published a work entitled 'The Book and Slavery irreconcileable.'"] TESTIMONY OF ANGELINA GRIMKÉ WELD. Mrs. Weld is the youngest daughter of the late Judge Grimké, of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, and a sister of the late Hon. Thomas S. Grimké, of Charleston. Fort Lee, Bergen Co., New Jersey, Fourth month 6th, 1839.