¶ … primary source written by slave have picked Lewis Clarke and his book Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clark. In my opinion, excerpts from this book give a clear account about the condition of a slave in the South in the first half of the 19th and a revelatory story of a fugitive slave and his experience as he ran for freedom. Lewis Clarke was born in 1812, in Madison County, Kentucky, as the son of a Scottish emigrant and a black mother. As such, he was a slave, owned by William Campbell. Upon his death, Lewis Clarke was sold to Betsy Branton and spend his years without his mother, who had been sold at a different plantation, several tens of miles away. Escaped from the plantation in 1841, he lived the remainder of his years, until his death in 1897, in Canada, where he published his book, Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clark, in 1845.

The book is a complete and well-written biography of the writer, starting from a short account about his father and his early days ("My father was from Scotland, and by trade a weaver (...) About the year 1800, or before, he came to Kentucky, and married Miss Letitia Campbell, then held as a slave") to the way his owner, William Campbell died and Lewis was bought by Mrs. Betsey Banton ("At the age of six or seven years I fell into the hands of his sister, Mrs. Betsey Banton.").

According to his account, life was not easy in Betsey Banton's household, where he worked and lived as a slave. I am emphasizing this so we may a clue about the reasons that later led him to become a fugitive, considering the fact that escape was usually punishable by death. Beating and refined use of torture (Clark mentions in his memoirs an oak club that was used for beating the hands and feet until blisters appeared: "this was an oak club, a foot and a half in length...

With this delicate weapon she would beat us upon the hands and upon the feet until they were blistered") were combined with wearing out the slaves, as they were the last to go to bed, usually in the late hours of the night, as they had to attend until everybody went to sleep, and the first to wake up in the morning.
According to Clark, they generally ate no more than two meals a day, usually of extremely poor quality, and it often happened that they were deprived of food as punishment. Clark mentions that this was done up to two days. Water was however even more scarce. From this, we may quite understand what the physical condition of slaves were on Betsy Banton's property: usually at subsistence levels, just enough for the slaves to survive and to be able to perform their duties around the house.

Emotional torture was hurting Clark as well, as he had been separated from his mother, brothers and sisters, who had been sold to different plantations. As we know, this was a common practice in slavery traditions in the South. Different accounts describe how slaves were brought to large marketplaces and sold no differently than cattle. In these conditions, it really didn't matter for slave owners that families were separated. As merchants, they were only interested in obtaining the best price for their goods. Clark himself describes an episode of a mother with seven children, when the mother and small babe were sold together and the rest of the family to different plantation owners.

The most interesting account is perhaps the part where Clark manages to escape and cross the border into Canada. As I have mentioned, this happened in 1841, when Clark was 29 years old. The main problem he faced was obviously the fact that a black man riding a horse at top speed may have…