A mistress in Charleston sent a grey headed female slave to the workhouse, and had her severely flogged.  The poor old woman went to an acquaintance of mine and begged her to buy her, and told her how cruelly she had been whipped.  My friend examined her lacerated back, and out of compassion did purchase her.  The circumstance was mentioned to one of the former owner’s relatives, who asked her if it were true.  The mistress told her it was, and said that she had made the severe whipping of this aged woman a subject of prayer, and that she believed she had done right to have it inflicted upon her.  The last ‘owner’ of the poor old slave, said she, had no fault to find with her as a servant.

I remember very well that when I was a child, our next door neighbor whipped a young woman so brutally, that in order to escape his blows she rushed through the drawing-room window in the second story, and fell upon the street pavement below and broke her hip.  This circumstance produced no excitement or inquiry.

The following circumstance occurred in Charleston, in 1828: 

A slaveholder, after flogging a little girl about thirteen years old, set her on a table with her feet fastened in a pair of stocks.  He then locked the door and took out the key.  When the door was opened she was found dead, having fallen from the table.  When I asked a prominent lawyer, who belonged to one of the first families in the State, whether the murderer of this helpless child could not be indicted, he coolly replied, that the slave was Mr. ——­’s property, and if he chose to suffer the loss, no one else had any thing to do with it.  The loss of human life, the distress of the parents and other relatives of the little girl, seemed utterly out of his thoughts:  it was the loss of property only that presented itself to his mind.

I knew a gentleman of great benevolence and generosity of character, so essentially to injure the eye of a little boy, about ten years old, as to destroy its sight, by the blow of a cowhide, inflicted whilst he was whipping him.[7] I have heard the same individual speak of “breaking down the spirit of a slave under the lash” as perfectly right.

[Footnote 7:  The Jewish law would have set this servant free, for his eye’s sake, but he was held in slavery and sold from hand to hand, although, besides this title to his liberty according to Jewish law, he was a mulatto, and therefore free under the Constitution of the United States, in whose preamble our fathers declare that they established it expressly to “secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity.”—­Ed.]

I also know that an aged slave of his, (by marriage,) was allowed to get a scanty and precarious subsistence, by begging in the streets of Charleston—­he was too old to work, and therefore his allowance was stopped, and he was turned out to make his living by begging.