Starkey, Yates County, N.Y.,

Oct. 17, 1850.

Frederick Douglass:ーHaving spent over three years in the cotton-growing section of the Southern States, I deeply sympathize with you and your cause. I hardly know how to express my feelings when I think of the accursed system of slavery which disgraces our nationーthis country of churches and ministers, who tell us, Sabbath after Sabbath, of this "land of freedom, where every one can sit under his own vine and fig-tree, and worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience." But it is false, as well as many other things spoken in the pulpit.

I lived with a family in Alabama who kept bloodhounds to hunt runaway negroes; and many is the tale I have heard of the chase after fugitives. At one time, one who had "been out," or run away, most of the time for several years, who preferred to live in the woods and swamps, subsisting at times on the charity of his fellow slaves, obtained from their cabins at night, and sometimes stealing from the whites. He belonged to a man whose plantation was on the Alabama river. He had often been chased by the dogs and men; but being an expert swimmer, he had generally managed to escape, and fleeing to some swamp not accessible to horsemen, he eluded pursuit. He was an old offender who thus refused to labor for his master, to whom his service was "due"ーfor what I never learned; not surely for an education, for he had none; not for the scanty amount of food he had received in infancy and childhood, for his parents, by their daily labor, had much more than paid for that; not for his clothing, for he had none until he was old enough to earn it, and one month's labor on the plantation would pay for the clothes of one year. The slave thought, in strict justice, that the master owed him for years of service; and as payment was not given, he at times stole his master's hogs and chickens, until finally the master, having been baffled for years, became exasperated and offered a large reward for his apprehension, dead or alive. This roused the cupidity of owners of negro hounds, who, after many trials and failures, finally succeeded in capturing the poor slave. He killed one dog before he took to a tree, for which act his pursuers, after getting him down, suffered the remaining dogs to bite and tear him so that he shortly afterwards died. He perished in a noble struggle for freedom. His destroyers received the bounty, and boasted of the deed for which it was paid.

S. B. BuckleyBuckley, Samuel Botsford

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