“The treatment of slaves at Musquito I consider much milder than that which I have witnessed in the United States.  Florida was under the Spanish government while I lived there.  There were about fifteen or twenty plantations at Musquito.  I have an indistinct recollection of four or five slaves dying of the cold in Amelia Island.  They belonged to Mr. Bunce of musquito.  The compensation of the overseers was a certain portion of the crop.”

GERRIT SMITH, Esq. of Peterboro, in a letter, dated Dec. 15, 1838, says: 

“I have just been conversing with an inhabitant of this town, on the subject of the cruelties of slavery.  My neighbors inform me that he is a man of veracity.  The candid manner of his communication utterly forbade the suspicion that he was attempting to deceive me.

“My informant says that he resided in Louisiana and Alabama during a great part of the years 1819 and 1820:—­that he frequently saw slaves whipped, never saw any killed; but often heard of their being killed:—­that in several instances he had seen a slave receive, in the space of two hours, five hundred lashes—­each stroke drawing blood.  He adds that this severe whipping was always followed by the application of strong brine to the lacerated parts.

“My informant further says, that in the spring of 1819, he steered a boat from Louisville to New Orleans.  Whilst stopping at a plantation on the east bank of the Mississippi, between Natchez and New Orleans, for the purpose of making sale of some of the articles with which the boat was freighted, he and his fellow boatmen saw a shockingly cruel punishment inflicted on a couple of slaves for the repeated offence of running away.  Straw was spread over the whole of their backs, and, after being fastened by a band of the same material, was ignited, and left to burn, until entirely consumed.  The agonies and screams of the sufferers he can never forget.”

Dr. DAVID NELSON, late president of Marion College, Missouri, a native of Tennessee, and till forty years old a slaveholder, said in an Anti-Slavery address at Northampton, Mass.  Jan. 1839—­

“I have not attempted to harrow your feelings with stories of cruelty.  I will, however, mention one or two among the many incidents that came under my observation as family physician.  I was one day dressing a blister, and the mistress of the house sent a little black girl into the kitchen to bring me some warm water.  She probably mistook her message; for she returned with a bowl full of boiling water; which her mistress no sooner perceived, than she thrust her hand into it, and held it there till it was half cooked.”

Mr. HENRY H. LOOMIS, a member of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in the city of New York, says, in a recent letter—­