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.
religious character.  This lady used to keep cowhides, or small paddles, (called ’pancake sticks,’) in four different apartments in her house; so that when she wished to punish, or to have punished, any of her slaves, she might not have the trouble of sending for an instrument of torture.  For many years, one or other, and often more of her slaves, were flogged every day; particularly the young slaves about the house, whose faces were slapped, or their hands beat with the ’pancake stick; for every trifling offence—­and often for no fault at all.  But the floggings were not all; the scolding, and abuse daily heaped upon them all, were worse:  ‘fools’ and ‘liars,’ ‘sluts’ and ‘husseys,’ ‘hypocrites’ and ‘good-for-nothing creatures’; were the common epithets with which her mouth was filled, when addressing her slaves, adults as well as children.  Very often she would take a position at her window, in an upper story, and scold at her slaves while working in the garden, at some distance from the house, (a large yard intervening,) and occasionally order a flogging.  I have known her thus on the watch, scolding for more than an hour at a time, in so loud a voice that the whole neighborhood could hear her; and this without the least apparent feeling of shame.  Indeed, it was no disgrace among slaveholders, and did not in the least injure her standing, either as a lady or a Christian, in the aristocratic circle in which she moved.  After the ‘revival’ in Charleston, in 1825, she opened her house to social prayer-meetings.  The room in which they were held in the evening, and where the voice of prayer was heard around the family altar, and where she herself retired for private devotion thrice each day, was the very place in which, when her slaves were to be whipped with the cowhide, they were taken to receive the infliction; and the wail of the sufferer would be heard, where, perhaps only a few hours previous, rose the voices of prayer and praise.  This mistress would occasionally send her slaves, male and female, to the Charleston work-house to be punished.  One poor girl, whom she sent there to be flogged, and who was accordingly stripped naked and whipped, showed me the deep gashes on her back—­I might have laid my whole finger in them—­large pieces of flesh had actually been cut out by the torturing lash.  She sent another female slave there, to be imprisoned and worked on the tread-mill.  This girl was confined several days, and forced to work the mill while in a state of suffering from another cause.  For ten days or two weeks after her return, she was lame, from the violent exertion necessary to enable her to keep the step on the machine.  She spoke to me with intense feeling of this outrage upon her, as a woman.  Her men servants were sometimes flogged there; and so exceedingly offensive has been the putrid flesh of their lacerated backs, for days after the infliction, that they would be kept out of the house—­the smell arising from their wounds being too horrible to be endured.  They were always stiff and sore for some days, and not in a condition to be seen by visitors.

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