A multitude of facts, illustrating the position that slaveholders treat their slaves worse than they do their cattle, will occur to all who are familiar with slavery.  When cattle break through their owners’ 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 by 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 labor, 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.  We have here merely begun a comparison, which the reader can easily carry out at length, from the materials furnished in this work.

We will, however, subjoin a few testimonies of slaveholders, and others who have resided in slave states, expressly asserting that slaves are treated worse than brutes.

The late Dr. GEORGE BUCHANAN, of Baltimore, Maryland, a member of the American Philosophical Society, in an oration delivered in Baltimore, July 4, 1791, page 10, says: 

“The Africans whom you despise, whom you more inhumanly treat than brutes, are equally capable of improvement with yourselves.”

The Rev. GEORGE WHITEFIELD, in his celebrated letter to the slaveholders of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, written one hundred years ago, (See Benezet’s Caution to Great Britain and her Colonies, page 13), says: 

“Sure I am, it is sinful to use them as bad, nay worse than if they were brutes; and whatever particular exceptions there may be, (as I would charitably hope there are some) I fear the generality of you that own negroes, are liable to such a charge.”

Mr. RICE, of Kentucky in his speech in the Convention that formed the Constitution of that state, in 1790, says: 

“He [the slave] is a rational creature, reduced by the power of legislation to the state of a brute, and thereby deprived of every privilege of humanity....  The brute may steal or rob, to supply his hunger; but the slave, though in the most starving condition, dare not do either, on penalty of death, or some severe punishment.”