It is not only true of the sugar planters, but of the slaveholders generally throughout the far south and south west, that they believe it for their interest to wear out the slaves by excessive toil in eight or ten years after they put them into the field.[4]

[Footnote 4:  Alexander Jones.  Esq., a large planter in West Feliciana, Louisiana, published a communication in the “North Carolina True American,” Nov. 25, 1838, in which, speaking of the horses employed in the mills on the plantations for ginning cotton, he says, they “are much whipped and jaded;” and adds, “In fact, this service is so severe on horses, as to shorten their lives in many instances, if not actually kill them in gear.”

Those who work one kind of their “live stock” so as to “shorten their lives,” or “kill them in gear” would not stick at doing the same thing to another kind.]

REV.  DOCTOR REED, of London, who went through Kentucky, Virginia and Maryland in the summer of 1834, gives the following testimony: 

“I was told confidently and from excellent authority, that recently at a meeting of planters in South Carolina, the question was seriously discussed whether the slave is more profitable to the owner, if well fed, well clothed, and worked lightly, or if made the most of at once, and exhausted in some eight years.  The decision was in favor of the last alternative.  That decision will perhaps make many shudder.  But to my mind this is not the chief evil.  The greater and original evil is considering the slave as property.  If he is only property and my property, then I have some right to ask how I may make that property most available.”

“Visit to the American Churches,” by Rev. Drs. Reed and Mattheson.  Vol. 2 p. 173.

REV.  JOHN O. CHOULES, recently pastor of a Baptist Church at New Bedford, Massachusetts, now of Buffalo, New York, made substantially the following statement in a speech in Boston.

“While attending the Baptist Triennial Convention at Richmond, Virginia, in the spring of 1835, as a delegate from Massachusetts, I had a conversation on slavery, with an officer of the Baptist Church in that city, at whose house I was a guest.  I asked my host if he did not apprehend that the slaves would eventually rise and exterminate their masters.

“Why,” said the gentleman, “I used to apprehend such a catastrophe, but God has made a providential opening, a merciful safety valve, and now I do not feel alarmed in the prospect of what is coming.  ‘What do you mean,’ said Mr. Choules, ’by providence opening a merciful safety valve?’ Why, said the gentleman, I will tell you; the slave traders come from the cotton and sugar plantations of the South and are willing to buy up more slaves than we can part with.  We must keep a stock for the purpose of rearing slaves, but we part with the most valuable, and at the same time, the most dangerous, and the demand is very constant and likely to be so, for when they go to these southern states, the average existence Is ONLY FIVE YEARS!”