When I was about thirteen years old, I attended a seminary, in Charleston, which was superintended by a man and his wife of superior education.  They had under their instruction the daughters of nearly all the aristocracy.  Their cruelty to their slaves, both male and female, I can never forget.  I remember one day there was called into the school room to open a window, a boy whose head had been shaved in order to disgrace him, and he had been so dreadfully whipped that he could hardly walk.  So horrible was the impression produced upon my mind by his heart-broken countenance and crippled person that I fainted away.  The sad and ghastly countenance of one of their female mulatto slaves who used to sit on a low stool at her sewing in the piazza, is now fresh before me.  She often told me, secretly, how cruelly she was whipped when they sent her to the work house.  I had known so much of the terrible scourgings inflicted in that house of blood, that when I was once obliged to pass it, the very sight smote me with such horror that my limbs could hardly sustain me.  I felt as if I was passing the precincts of hell.  A friend of mine who lived in the neighborhood, told me she often heard the screams of the slaves under their torture.

I once heard a physician of a high family, and of great respectability in his profession, say, that when he sent his slaves to the work-house to be flogged, he always went to see it done, that he might be sure they were properly, i.e. severely whipped.  He also related the following circumstance in my presence.  He had sent a youth of about eighteen to this horrible place to be whipped and afterwards to be worked upon the treadmill.  From not keeping the step, which probably he COULD NOT do, in consequence of the lacerated state of his body; his arm got terribly torn, from the shoulder to the wrist.  This physician said, he went every day to attend to it himself, in order that he might use those restoratives, which would inflict the greatest possible pain.  This poor boy, after being imprisoned there for some weeks, was then brought home, and compelled to wear iron clogs on his ankles for one or two months.  I saw him with those irons on one day when I was at the house.  This man was, when young, remarkable in the fashionable world for his elegant and fascinating manners, but the exercise of the slaveholder’s power has thrown the fierce air of tyranny even over these.

I heard another man of equally high standing say, that he believed he suffered far more than his waiter did whenever he flogged him for he felt the exertion for days afterward, but he could not let his servant go on in the neglect of his business, it was his duty to chastise him.  “His duty” to flog this boy of seventeen so severely that he felt the exertion for days after! and yet he never felt it to be his duty to instruct him, or have him instructed, even in the common principles of morality.