The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 3 of 4 eBook

American Anti-Slavery Society
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,269 pages of information about The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 3 of 4.

The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 3 of 4 eBook

American Anti-Slavery Society
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,269 pages of information about The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 3 of 4.
for not even the presence of such a guest could destroy the bloody design.  The guest interceded with all the mildness yet earnestness of a brother and new visitor.  But all in vain, ’the woman had been saucy and must be punished.’  The cowhide was accordingly produced, and the Rev. Mr. C., a large and very stout man, applied it ‘manfully’ on ‘woman’s’ bare and ‘shrinking flesh.’  I say bare, because you know that the slave women generally have but three or four inches of the arm near the shoulder covered, and the neck is left entirely exposed.  As the cowhide moved back and forward, striking right and left, on the head, neck and arms, at every few strokes the sympathizing guest would exclaim, ‘O, brother C. desist’ But brother C. pursued his brutal work, till, after inflicting about sixty lashes, the woman was found to be suffused with blood on the hinder part of her neck, and under her frock between the shoulders.  Yet this Rev. gentleman is well esteemed in the church—­was, three or four years since, moderator of the synod of Philadelphia, and yet walks abroad, feeling himself unrebuked by law or gospel.  Ah, sir does not this narration give fearful force to the query—­What has the church to do with slavery?’ Comment on the facts is unnecessary, yet allow me to conclude by saying, that it is my opinion such occurrences are not rare in the south.

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.

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The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 3 of 4 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.