The thing was sudden, and though the thought of writing an
instrument of slavery for one of my fellow-creatures made me feel
uneasy, yet I remembered I was hired by the year, that it was my master
who directed me to do it, and that it was an elderly man, a member of
our society, who bought her. So through weakness I gave way and wrote,
but, at executing it, I was so afflicted in my mind, that I said before
my master and the friend, that I believed slave-keeping to be a practice
inconsistent with the Christian religion. This in some degree abated my
uneasiness; yet, as often as I reflected seriously upon it, I thought I
should have been clearer, if I had desired to have been excused from it,
as a thing against my conscience; for such it was. And some time after
this, a young man of our society spoke to me to write a conveyance of a
slave to him, he having lately taken a Negro into his house. I told him
I was not easy to write it; for though many of our meeting, and in other
places, kept slaves, I still believed the practice was not right, and
desired to be excused from the writing. I spoke to him in good-will; and
he told me that keeping slaves was not altogether agreeable to his mind,
but that the slave being a gift to his wife he had accepted of her.
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