J.N.”
REV. CHARLES STEWART RENSHAW, of Quincy, Illinois, in a recent letter, speaking of his residence, for a period, in Kentucky, says—
“In a conversation with Mr. Robert Willis, he told me that his negro girl had run away from him some time previous. He was convinced that she was lurking round, and he watched for her. He soon found the place of her concealment, drew her from it, got a rope, and tied her hands across each other, then threw the rope over a beam in the kitchen, and hoisted her up by the wrists; ‘and,’ said he, ’I whipped her there till I made the lint fly, I tell you.’ I asked him the meaning of making ‘the lint fly,’ and he replied, ‘till the blood flew.’ I spoke of the iniquity and cruelty of slavery, and of its immediate abandonment. He confessed it an evil, but said, ’I am a colonizationist—I believe in that scheme.’ Mr. Willis is a teacher of sacred music, and a member of the Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Kentucky.”
Mr. R. speaking of the PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER and church where he resided, says:
“The minister and all the church members held slaves. Some were treated kindly, others harshly. There was not a shade of difference between their slaves and those of their infidel neighbors, either in their physical, intellectual, or moral state: in some cases they would suffer in the comparison.
“In the kitchen of the minister of the church, a slave man was living in open adultery with a slave woman, who was a member of the church, with an ‘assured hope’ of heaven—whilst the man’s wife was on the minister’s farm in Fayette county. The minister had to bring a cook down from his farm to the place in which he was preaching. The choice was between the wife of the man and this church member. He left the wife, and brought the church member to the adulterer’s bed.