No one can imagine my feelings in my reflecting moments, but he who has himself been a slave.

Oh! I have often wept over my condition, while sauntering through the forest, to escape cruel punishment.
"No arm to protect me from tyrants aggression; No parents to cheer me when laden with grief.
Man may picture the bounds of the rocks and the rivers, The hills and the valleys, the lakes and the ocean, But the horrors of slavery, he never can trace." The term slave to this day sounds with terror to my soul,--a word too obnoxious to speak--a system too intolerable to be endured.

I know this from long and sad experience.

I now feel as if I had just been aroused from sleep, and looking back with quickened perception at the state of torment from whence I fled.

I was there held and claimed as a slave; as such I was subjected to the will and power of my keeper, in all respects whatsoever.