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.