The children were not her own, but her grandchildren--the children of her daughters.

She took delight in having them around her, and in attending to their few wants.

The practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter out at distances too great to admit of their meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system.

But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute.

It is a successful method of obliterating{29 "OLD MASTER"} from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of _the family_, as an institution.
Most of the children, however, in this instance, being the children of my grandmother's daughters, the notions of family, and the reciprocal duties and benefits of the relation, had a better chance of being understood than where children are placed--as they often are in the hands of strangers, who have no care for them, apart from the wishes of their masters.