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SLAVERY A SYSTEM OF
INHERENT CRUELTY
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THIRTY HUNDRED THOUSAND PERSONS in the
United States of American, men, women, and children, are
in Slavery. Is slavery, as a condition for human
beings, good, bad, or indifferent? We submit the
question without argument. You have common sense,
and conscience, and a human heart - pronounce upon it.
You have wife, or a husband, a cild a father, a
mother, a brother, or a sister - make the case your own,
make it theirs, and bring in your verdict. The
case of human rights against slavery has been
adjudicated in the court
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of conscience times innumerable. The same verdict
has always been rendered - "Guilty;" the same sentence
has always been pronounced - "Let it be accursed!" and
human nature, with her million echoes, has rung it round
the world in every language under heaven - " Let
it be accursed! Let it be accursed!" His
heart is false to human nature who will not say "Amen."
There is not a man on earth who does not believe that
slavery is a curse. Human beings may be
inconsistent, but human nature is true to
herself. She has uttered her testimony against
slavery with a shriek, ever since the monster was
begotten; and, till it perishes amidst the execrations
of the universe, she will traverse the world on its
track, dealing her bolts upon its head, and dashing
against it her condemning brand. We repeat it -
every man knows that slavery is a curse. Whoever
denies this, his lips libel his heart. Try him;
clank the chains in his ears, and tell him they are for
him; give him an hour to prepare his wife and
children for a life of slavery; bid him make haste and
get ready their necks for the yoke, and their wrists for
the coffle chains, then look at his pale lips and
trembling knees, and you have natures testimony
against slavery.
At least thirty hundred thousand persons in the United
States are in this condition. They were made
slaves, and are held such by force, and by being put in
fear, and this for no crime! Reader, what have you
to say of such treatment? Is it right, just,
benevolent? Suppose I should seize you, rob you of
your liberty, drive you into the field, and make you
work without pay as long as you live, would that be
justice and kindness, or monstrous injustice and
cruelty? Now, everybody knows that the
slaveholders do these things to the slaves every day,
and yet it is stoutly affirmed that they treat them well
and kindly, and that their tender regard for their
slaves restrains their masters from inflicting cruelties
upon them. We shall go into no metaphysics to show
the absurdity of this pretence. The man who
robs you every clay is, forsooth, quite too
tenderhearted ever to cuff or kick you! True, he
can snatch your money, but he does it gently, lest he
should hurt you. He can empty your pockets without
qualms, but if your stomach is empty, it cuts him
to the quick. He can make you work, a life-time
without pay, but loves you too well to let you go
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hungry. He fleeces you of your rights with
a relish, but is shocked if you work bareheaded in
summer, or in winter without warm stockings. He
can make you go without your liberty, but never
without a shirt. He can crush, in you, all hope of
bettering your condition, by vowing that you shall die
his slave; but, though he can coolly torture your
feelings, he is too compassionate to lacerate your back
- he can break your heart, but he is very tender of your
skin. He can strip you of all protection, and thus
expose you to all outrages; but if you are exposed to
the weather, half clad and half sheltered, how
yearn his tender bowels! What! slaveholders
talk of treating men well, and yet not only rob them of
all they get, and as fast as they get it, but rob them
of themselves also; their very hands and feet;
all their muscles, and limbs, and senses; their bodies
and minds; their time, and liberty, and earnings; their
free speech and rights of conscience; their right to
acquire knowledge, and property, and reputation; and yet
they, who plunder them of all these, would fain make us
believe that their soft hearts ooze out so lovingly
toward their slaves, that they always keep them well
housed and well clad, never push the too hard in the
field, never make their dear backs smart, nor let their
dear stomachs get empty.
But there is no end to these absurdities. Are
slaveholders dunces, or do they take all the rest of the
world to be, that they think to bandage our eyes with
such thin gauzes? Protesting their kind regard for
those whom they hourly plunder of all they have and all
they get! What! when they have seized their
victims, and annihilated all their rights, still
claim to be the special guardians of their happiness?
Plunderers of their liberty, yet the careful
suppliers of their wants? Robbers of their
earnings, yet watchful sentinels round their interests,
and kind providers for their comfort? Filchingall
their time, yet granting generous donations for rest and
sleep? Stealing the use of their muscles, yet
thoughtful of their ease? Putting them under
drivers, yet careful that they are not hard pushed?
Too humane, forsooth, to stint the stomachs of their
slaves, yet force their minds to starve, and
brandish over them pains and penalties if they dare to
reach forth for the smallest crumb of knowledge, even a
letter of the alphabet!
It is no marvel that slaveholders are always talking of
their
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kind treatment of their slaves. The only
marvel is, that men of sense can be gulled by such
professions. Despots always insist that they are
merciful. The greatest tyrants that ever dripped
with blood have assumed the titles of "most gracious,"
"most clement," "most merciful," &c., and have
ordered their crouching vassals to accost them thus.
When did not vice lay claim to those virtues which are
the opposites of its habitual crimes? The guilty,
according to their own showing, are always innocent, and
cowards brave, and drunkards sober, and harlots chaste,
and pickpockets honest to a fault. Every body
understands this. When a man's tongue grows thick,
and he begins to hiccough and walk cross-legged, we
expect him, as a matter of course, to protest that he is
not drunk; so when a man is always singing the praises
of his own honesty, we instinctively watch his
movements, and look out for our pocket-books.
Whoever is simple enough to be hoaxed by such
professions, should never be trusted in the streets
without somebody to take care of him. Human nature
works out in slaveholders just as it does in other men,
and in American slaveholders just as in English, French,
Turkish, Algerine, Roman, and Grecian. The
Spartans boasted of their kindness to their slaves,
while they whipped them to death by thousands at the
altars of their gods. The Romans lauded their own
mild treatment of their bondsmen, while they branded
their names on their flesh with hot irons, and, when
old, threw them into their fish-ponds, or, like Cato
"the Just," starved them to death. It is the boast
of the Turks that they treat their slaves as though they
were their children, yet their common name for them is
"dogs;" and, for the merest trifles, their feet are
bastinadoed to a jelly, or their heads clipped off with
a scimitar. The Portuguese pride themselves on
their gentle bearing towards their slaves, yet the
streets of Rio Janeiro are filled with naked men and
women yoked in pairs to carts and waggons, and whipped
by drivers like beasts of burden.
Slaveholders, the world over, have sung the praises of
their tender mercies towards their slaves. Even
the wretches that plied the African slave-trade tried to
rebut Clarkson's proofs of their cruelties, by speeches,
affidavits, and published pamphlets, setting forth the
accommodations of the "middle passage," and their kind
attentions to the comfort of those whom
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they had stolen from their homes, and kept stowed away
under hatches, during a voyage of four thousand miles.
So, according to the testimony of the autocrat of all
the Russias, he exercises great clemency towards the
Poles, though he exiles them by thousands to the snows
of Siberia, and tramples them down by millions at home.
Who discredits the atrocities perpetrated by Ovando
in Hispaniola, Pizarro in Peru, and Cortez
in Mexico, because they filled the ears of the Spanish
court with protestations of their benignant rule?
While they were yoking the enslaved natives like beasts
to the draught, working them to death by thousands in
their mines, hunting them with bloodhounds, torturing
them on racks, and broiling them on beds of coal, their
representations to the mother country teemed with
eulogies of their parental sway! The bloody
atrocities of Philip II., in the expulsion of his
Moorish subjects, are matters of imperishable history.
Who disbelieves or doubts them? And yet his
courtiers magnified his virtues, and chanted his
clemency and his mercy, while the wail of a million
victims, smitten down by a tempest of fire and slaughter
let loose at his bidding, rose above the Te Deums
that thundered from all Spain's cathedrals. When
Louis XIV, revoked the edict of Nantes, and
proclaimed two millions of his subjects free plunder for
persecution - when, from the English Channel to the
Pyrenees, the mangled bodies of the Protestants were
dragged on reeking hurdles by a shouting populace - he
claimed to be "the father of his people," and wrote
himself, "His most Christian Majesty." That
the slaves in the United States are treated with
barbarous inhumanity; that they are over-worked,
under-fed, wretchedly clad and lodged, and have
insufficient sleep; that they are often made to wear
round their necks iron collars armed with prongs, to
drag heavy chains and weights at their feet while
working in the field, and to wear yokes, and bells, and
iron horns; that they are often kept confined in the
stocks day and night for weeks together, made to wear
gags in their mouths for hours or days, have some of
their front teeth torn out or broken off, that they may
be easily detected when they run away; that they are
frequently flogged with terrible severity, have red
pepper rubbed into their lacerated flesh, and hot brine,
spirits of turpentine, &c, poured over the gashes to
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increase the torture; that they are often stripped
naked, their backs and limbs cut with knives, bruised
and mangled by scores and hundreds of blows with the
paddle, and terribly torn by the claws of cats drawn
over them by their tormentors;
that they are often hunted with
bloodhounds, and shot down like beasts, or torn in
pieces by dogs; that they are often suspended by the
arms, and whipped and beaten till they faint, and, when
revived by restoratives, beaten again till they faint,
and sometimes till they die; that their ears are often
cut off, their eyes knocked out, their bones broken,
their flesh branded with red hot irons; that they are
maimed, mutilated, and burned to death over slow fires;
are undeniable facts.
The enormities inflicted by slaveholders upon their
slaves will never be discredited, except by those who
overlook the simple fact, that he who holds human beings
as his bona fide property, regards them as property, and
not as persons; this is his permanent state of mind
toward them. He does not contemplate slaves as
human beings, consequently does not treat them as such;
and, with entire indifference, sees them suffer
privations, and writhe under blows, which, if inflicted
upon whites, would fill him with horror and indignation.
He regards
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that as good treatment of slaves, which would seem to
him insufferable abuse if practised upon others; and
would denounce that as a monstrous outrage and horrible
cruelty, if perpetrated upon white men and women, which
he sees every day meted out to black slaves, without
perhaps ever thinking it cruel. Accustomed all his
life to regard them rather as domestic animals, to hear
them stormed at, and to see them cuffed and caned; and,
being himself in constant habit of treating them thus,
such practices have become to him a mere matter of
course, and make no impression on his mind. True, it is
incredible that men should treat as chattels
those whom they truly regard as human beings;
but that they should treat as chattels and working
animals those whom they regard as such, is no
marvel. The common treatment of dogs, when they
are in the way, is to kick them out of it; we see them
every day kicked off sidewalks, and on Sabbaths out of
churches; yet, as they are but dogs, these do not strike
us as outrages; yet if we were to see men, women, and
children - our neighbours and friends - kicked out of
stores by merchants, or out of churches by the deacons
and sexton, we should call the perpetrators inhuman
wretches.
Slaveholders organize themselves into a tribunal to
adjudicate upon their own conduct, and give us, in their
decisions, their estimate of their own character;
informing us with characteristic modesty, that they have
a high opinion of themselves; that in their own
judgment, they are very mild, kind, and merciful
gentlemen! In these conceptions of their own merits, and
of the eminent propriety of their bearing towards their
slaves, - slaveholders remind us of the Spaniard, who
always took off his hat whenever he spoke of himself,
and of the Governor of Schiraz, who, from a sense of
justice to his own character, added to his other titles
those of "Flower of Courtesy," "Nutmeg of Consolation,''
and "Rose of Delight."
When men speak of the treatment of others as being
either good or bad, their declarations are not generally
to be taken as testimony to matters of fact, so
much as expressions of their own feelings towards
those persons or classes who are the subjects of such
treatment. If those persons are their
fellow-citizens; if they are in the same class of
society with themselves; of the same language, creed,
and colour; similar in their habits,
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pursuits, and sympathies; they will keenly feel any
wrong done to them, and denounce it as base, outrageous
treatment; but let the same wrongs be done to persons of
a condition in all respects the reverse, persons whom
they habitually despise, and regard only in the light of
mere conveniences, to be used for their pleasure, and
the idea that such treatment is barbarous will be
laughed at as ridiculous.
We have said that slaveholders regard their slaves not
as human beings, but as mere working animals, or
merchandise. The whole vocabulary of slaveholders,
their laws, their usages, and their entire treatment of
their slaves, fully establish this. The same terms
are applied to slaves that are given to cattle.
They are called " stock." So, when the children of
slaves are spoken of prospectively, they are called
their "increase;" the same term that is applied to
flocks and herds. So the female slaves that are
mothers are called "breeders," till past child-bearing;
and often the same terms are applied to the different
sexes that are applied to the males and females among
cattle. Those who compel the labour of slaves and
cattle have the same appellation - ''drivers;" the names
which they call them are the same, and similar to those
given to their horses and oxen. The laws of slave
states make them property, equally with goats and swine;
they are levied upon for debt in the same way; they are
included, in the same advertisements of public sales,
with cattle, swine, and asses; when moved from one part
of the country to another, they are herded in droves
like cattle, and, like them, urged on by drivers; their
labour is compelled in the same way. They are
bought and sold, and separated like cattle; when exposed
for sale, their good qualities are described as jockeys
show off the good points of their horses; their
strength, activity, skill, power of endurance, &c, are
lauded, and those who bid upon them examine their
persons just as purchasers inspect horses and oxen; they
open their mouths to see if their teeth are sound; strip
their backs to see if they are badly scarred, and handle
their limbs and muscles to see if they are firmly knit.
Like horses, they are warranted to be "sound," or to be
returned to the owner if "unsound." A father gives
his son a horse and slave; by his will he distributes
among them his race-horses, hounds, gamecocks, and
slaves. We leave the reader to carry out the
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parallel which we have only begun. Its details would
cover many pages.
That slaveholders do not practically regard slaves as
human beings, is abundantly shown by their
own voluntary testimony. In a recent work,
entitled, The South Vindicated from the Treason and
Fanaticism of Northern Abolitionists, which was
written, we are informed, by Colonel Dayton,
late member of Congress from South Carolina, the writer,
speaking of the awe with which the slaves regard the
whites, says, "The northerner looks upon a band of
negroes as upon so many men, but the
planter or southerner views them in a very different
light!"
Extract from a speech of Mr. Summers, of
Virginia, in the legislature of that state, Jan. 26,
1833. See the Richmond Whig: - "When, in the sublime
lessons of Christianity, he (the slaveholder) is taught
to 'do unto others as he would have others do unto him,'
HE NEVER DREAMS THAT THE DEGRADED NEGRO IS WITHIN THE
PALE OF THAT HOLY CANON."
President Jefferson, in his letter to
Governor Coles of Illinois, dated Aug. 25,
1814, asserts that slaveholders regard their slaves as
brutes, in the following remarkable language: - "Nursed
and educated in the daily habit of seeing the degraded
condition, both bodily and mental, of these unfortunate
beings (the slaves), FEW MINDS HAVE YET DOUBTED BUT THAT
THEY WERE AS LEGITIMATE SUBJECTS OF PROPERTY AS THEIR
HORSES OR CATTLE."
Having shown that slaveholders regard their slaves as
mere working animals and cattle, we now proceed to show
that their actual treatment of them is worse than
it would be if they were brutes. We repeat
it - SLAVEHOLDERS TREAT THEIR SLAVES WORSE THAN
THEY DO THEIR BRUTES. Whoever heard of cows or
sheep being deliberately tied up and beaten and
lacerated till they died? or horses coolly tortured by
the hour, till covered with mangled flesh? or of swine
having their legs tied, and being suspended from a tree,
and lacerated with thongs for hours? or of hounds
stretched and made fast at full length, flayed
with whips, red pepper rubbed into their bleeding
gashes, and hot brine dashed on to aggravate the
torture? Yet, just such forms and degrees of
torture are daily perpetrated upon the slaves.
Now, no man that knows human nature will marvel at this.
Though great cruelties have always been inflicted
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by men upon brutes, yet incomparably the most horrid
ever perpetrated have been those of men upon their
own species. Any leaf of history, turned over
at random, has proof enough of this. Every
reflecting mind perceives that when men hold human
beings as property, they must, from the
nature of the case, treat them worse than they treat
their horses and oxen. It is impossible for
cattle to excite in men such tempests of fury as men
excite in each other. Men are often provoked if
their horses or hounds refuse to do, or their pigs
refuse to go where they wish to drive them, but the
feeling is rarely intense, and never permanent. It
is vexation and impatience, rather than settled rage,
malignity, or revenge. If horses and dogs were
intelligent beings, and still held as property, their
opposition to the wishes of their owners would
exasperate them immeasurably more than it would be
possible for them to do with the minds of brutes.
None but little children and idiots get angry at sticks
and stones that lie in their way or hurt them; but put
into sticks and stones intelligence, and will, and power
of feeling and motion, while they remain as now,
articles of property, and what a towering rage would men
be in, if bushes whipped them in the face when they
walked among them, or stones rolled over their toes when
they climbed hills! and what exemplary vengeance would
be inflicted upon door-steps and hearth-stones, if they
were to move out of their places, instead of lying still
where they were put for their owners to tread upon!
The greatest provocation to human nature is
opposition to its will. If a man's will be
resisted by one far below him, the provocation is
vastly greater than when it is resisted by an
acknowledged superior. In the former case, it
inflames strong passions, which, in the latter, lie
dormant. The rage of proud Haman knew no bounds
against the poor Jew who would not do as he wished, and
so he built a gallows for him. If the person
opposing the will of another be so far below him as to
be on a level with chattels, and be actually held and
used as an article of property, pride, scorn lust of
power, rage, and revenge, explode together upon the
hapless victim. The idea of property having
a will, and that, too, in opposition to the will of its
owner, and counteracting it, is a stimulant of
terrible power to the most relentless human passions;
and, from the nature of slavery, and the constitution of
the human mind, this
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fierce stimulant must, with various degrees of strength,
act upon slaveholders almost without ceasing. The
slave, however abject and crushed, is an intelligent
being: he has a will, and that will cannot be
annihilated, it will show itself; if for a moment
it is smothered, like pent-up fires, when vent is found,
it flames the fiercer. Make intelligence
property, and its manager will have his match; he is
met at every turn by an opposing will, not in the
form of downright rebellion and defiance, but yet,
visibly, an ever-opposing will. He sees it
in the dissatisfied look, and reluctant air, and
unwilling movement; the constrained strokes of labour,
the drawling tones, the slow hearing, the feigned
stupidity, the sham pains and sickness, the short
memory; and he feels it every hour, in
innumerable forms, frustrating his designs by a
ceaseless, though perhaps invisible countermining.
This unceasing opposition to the will of its "owner," on
the part of his rational "property," is to the
slaveholder as the hot iron to the nerve. He raves
under it, and storms, and gnashes, and smites; but the
more he smites the hotter it gets, and the more it burns
him. Further, this opposition of the slave's will
to his owner's, not only excites him to severity, that
he may gratify his rage, but makes it necessary for him
to use violence in breaking down this resistance - thus
subjecting the slave to additional tortures. There
is another inducement to cruel inflictions upon the
slave, and a necessity for it, which does not exist in
the case of brutes. Offenders must be made an
example to others, to strike them with terror. If
a slave runs away and is caught, his master flogs him
with terrible severity, not merely to gratify his
resentment, and to keep him from running away again, but
as a warning to others. So in every case of
disobedience, neglect, stubbornness, unfaithfulness,
indolence, insolence, theft, feigned sickness, when his
directions are forgotten, or slighted, or supposed to
be, or his wishes crossed, or his property injured or
left exposed, or his work ill-executed, the master is
tempted to inflict cruelties, not merely to wreak his
own vengeance upon him, and to make the slave more
circumspect in future, but to sustain his authority over
the other slaves, to restrain them from like practices,
and to preserve his own property.
A multitude of facts, illustrating the position that
slaveholders treat their slaves worse than they
do their cattle, will
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occur to all who are familiar with slavery. When
cattle break through their owner's inclosures and
escape, if found, they are driven back and fastened in
again; and even slaveholders would execrate, as a
wretch, the man who should tie them up, and bruise and
lacerate them for straying away; but when slaves
that have escaped are caught, they are flogged with the
most terrible severity. When herds of cattle are
driven to market, they are suffered to go in the easiest
way, each by himself; but when slaves are driven to
market, they are fastened together with handcuffs,
galled with iron collars and chains, and thus forced to
travel on foot hundreds of miles, sleeping at night in
their chains. Sheep, and sometimes horned cattle,
are marked with their owners' initials, but this is
generally done with paint, and of course produces no
pain. Slaves, too, are often marked with their
owners' initials, but the letters are stamped into their
flesh with a hot iron. Cattle are suffered to
graze their pastures without stint; but the slaves are
restrained in their food to a fixed allowance. The
slaveholders' horses are notoriously far better fed,
more moderately worked, have fewer hours of labour, and
longer intervals of rest, than their slaves; and their
valuable horses are far more comfortably housed and
lodged, and their stables more effectually defended from
the weather, than the slaves' huts.
When we hear slaveholders say that their slaves are
well treated, we have only to remember that
they are not speaking of persons, but of
property; not of men and women, but of chattels
and things; not of friends and associates, but of
vassals and victims; not of those whom
they respect and honour, but of those whom they scorn
and trample on; not of those with whom they sympathize,
and co-operate, and interchage courtesies, but of
those whom they regard with contempt and aversion, and
disdainfully set with the dogs of their flock.
Reader, keep this fact in your mind, and you will have a
clue to the slaveholder's definition of "good
treatment."
Leeds Anti-slavery
Series. No. 7.
Sold by W. and F. G. CASH, 5,
Bishopsgate Street, London; and by JANE JOWETT, Friends'
Meeting Yard, Leeds, at 1s. 2. per 100.
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