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Laura M.[organ] Autograph Letter Signed. Payne’s Landing [Kentucky], June 14, 1850. 3pp.+address leaf. To her fiancé, Ezra G.[uard] Hayes, Indianapolis, Indiana. 

"...for the first time in my life I saw slaves at work – poor black fellows, I pitied them.”

Laura Morgan was a 23 year-old Indiana woman, engaged to Hayes, a young farmer whose great grandfather was one of the first to emigrate to the Northwest Territory after the Revolutionary War. Laura wrote while visiting her brother, who had a cabin near Warsaw, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Indiana. Having never before visited a southern state, she was impressed by the friendliness of the people, even the “tobacco smoking women” and cheerful farmers who lived in the most “extreme poverty” she had ever seen. But it was while taking a “ride on horseback through the hills and hollows” that she was most taken aback, when, for the first time in her life, she saw slaves at work.