Daniel Hall

I escaped from the neighborhood of New Orleans, seventeen years ago; had some difficulty about getting through Illinois—there were many slaveholders in heart in Illinois—but I got through. I settled in Malden at Amherstburg. It was then a dense woods—with but little cleared land. There were very few colored people when I got there. If a man had half or three quarters of an acre of corn, he thought he had a large patch: now they have twenty-five or thirty acre lots. The clearing has been done by colored and white, mostly by colored men, as I know, for I cleared up a great deal myself. On the Lake Erie shore, the colored people have raised in past years, a great deal of tobacco, but now they raise corn, wheat, potatoes, and buckwheat.

I look at slavery as being heinous in the sight of God. And as for slaveholders, what is to become of people who take the husband from his wife, and the infant from its mother, and sell them where they can never see each other again?

What the colored people want is, land and education. With these, they will do well here.

By the blessing of God, I have been enabled to become possessor of fifty acres in Colchester, of which six or seven acres are cleared.