The Wheeling Daily Register

Here is a curious story of the old slavery times, which we pick up from a Western Carolina newspaper. In the gold mining regions of Burke county lived an industrious, well-to-do colored woman, named Nancy Boyce. She was engaged to marry Jack, a slave, and in order to have everything pleasant, she put her hand in her pocket and bought him of his master. But she was shrewd enough to take a bill of sale of him, fortunately, as it happened, for Jack turned out to be utterly worthless, and a perfect sot. But little need was there for Nancy to go to the courts for relief by divorce. She knew a better way than that. She owned her man, and she simply sold him to a slave-dealer, who carried him off to the far Southwest, so that the sharp Nancy was never bothered by him again. Husbands have been badly sold before, though not in this particular way.