“I heard of an estate managed by an individual who was considered as singularly successful, and who was able to govern the slaves without the use of the whip.  I was anxious to see him, and trusted that some discovery had been made favorable to humanity.  I asked him how he was able to dispense with corporal punishment.  He replied to me, with a very determined look, ’The slaves know that the work must be done, and that it is better to do it without punishment than with it.’  In other words, the certainty and dread of chastisement were so impressed on them, that they never incurred it.

“I then found that the slaves on this well-managed estate, decreased in number.  I asked the cause.  He replied, with perfect frankness and ease, ‘The gang is not large enough for the estate.’  In other words, they were not equal to the work of the plantation, and, yet were made to do it, though with the certainty of abridging life.

“On this plantation the huts were uncommonly convenient.  There was an unusual air of neatness.  A superficial observer would have called the slaves happy.  Yet they were living under a severe, subduing discipline, and were over-worked to a degree that shortened life.”—­Channing on Slavery, page 162, first edition.

PHILEMON BLISS, Esq., a lawyer of Elyria, Ohio, who spent some time in Florida, gives the following testimony to the over-working of the slaves: 

“It is not uncommon for hands, in hurrying times, beside working all day, to labor half the night.  This is usually the case on sugar plantations, during the sugar-boiling season; and on cotton, during its gathering.  Beside the regular task of picking cotton, averaging of the short staple, when the crop is good, 100 pounds a day to the hand, the ginning (extracting the seed,) and baling was done in the night.  Said Mr. ——­ to me, while conversing upon the customary labor of slaves, ’I work my niggers in a hurrying time till 11 or 12 o’clock at night, and have them up by four in the morning.’

“Beside the common inducement, the desire of gain, to make a large crop, the desire is increased by that spirit of gambling, so common at the south.  It is very common to bet on the issue of a crop.  A. lays a wager that, from a given number of hands, he will make more cotton than B. The wager is accepted, and then begins the contest; and who bears the burden of it?  How many tears, yea, how many broken constitutions, and premature deaths, have been the effect of this spirit?  From the desperate energy of purpose with which the gambler pursues his object, from the passions which the practice calls into exercise, we might conjecture many.  Such is the fact.  In Middle Florida, a broken-winded negro is more common than a broken-winded horse; though usually, when they are declared unsound, or when their constitution is so broken that their recovery is despaired of, they are exported to New Orleans, to drag out