They are badly clothed.

They are miserably fed.

Their drudgery is intense and incessant and their rest short.

For scarcely are their heads reclined, scarcely have their bodies a respite from the labour of the day, or the cruel hand of the overseer, but they are summoned to renew their sorrows.

In this manner they go on from year to year, in a state of the lowest degradation, without a single law to protect them, without the possibility of redress, without a hope that their situation will be changed, unless death should terminate the scene.
Having described the general situation of these unfortunate people, we shall now take notice of the common consequences that are found to attend it, and relate them separately, as they result either from long and painful _labour_, a _want_ of the common necessaries of life, or continual _severity_.
Oppressed by a daily task of such immoderate labour as human nature is utterly unable to perform, many of them run away from their masters.
They fly to the recesses of the mountains, where they choose rather to live upon any thing that the soil affords them, nay, the very soil itself, than return to that _happy situation_, which is represented by the _receivers_, as the condition of a slave.
It sometimes happens, that the manager of a mountain plantation, falls in with one of these; he immediately seizes him, and threatens to carry him to his former master, unless he will consent to live on the mountain and cultivate his ground.