poor slaves with their almost good for nothing sale shoes?  Inasmuch as it is done unto one of those poor sufferers it is done unto our Saviour.  The above practice of clothing the slave is customary to some extent.  How many, however, fail of this, God only knows.  The children and old slaves are, I should think, exceptions to the above rule.  The males and females have their suits from the same cloth for their winter dresses.  These winter garments appear to be made of a mixture of cotton and wool, very coarse and sleazy.  The whole suit for the men consists of a pair of pantaloons and a short sailor-jacket, without shirt, vest, hat, stockings, or any kind of loose garments! These, if worn steadily when at work, would not probably last more than one or two months; therefore, for the sake of saving them, many of them work, especially in the summer, with no clothing on them except a cloth tied round their waist, and almost all with nothing more on them than pantaloons, and these frequently so torn that they do not serve the purposes of common decency.  The women have for clothing a short petticoat, and a short loose gown, something like the male’s sailor-jacket, without any under garment, stockings, bonnets, hoods, caps, or any kind of over-clothes. When at work in the warm weather, they usually strip off the loose gown, and have nothing on but a short petticoat with some kind of covering over their breasts.  Many children may be seen in the summer months as naked as they came into the world.  I think, as a whole, they suffer more for the want of comfortable bed clothes, than they do for wearing apparel.  It is true, that some by begging or buying have more clothes than above described, but the masters provide them with no more.  They are miserable objects of pity.  It may be said of many of them, “I was naked and ye clothed me not.”  It is enough to melt the hardest heart to see the ragged mothers nursing their almost naked children, with but a morsel of the coarsest food to eat.  The Southern horses and dogs have enough to eat and good care taken of them, but Southern negroes, who can describe their misery?

V. PUNISHMENTS.

The ordinary mode of punishing the slaves is both cruel and barbarous.  The masters seldom, if ever, try to govern their slaves by moral influence, but by whipping, kicking, beating, starving, branding, cat-hauling, loading with irons, imprisoning, or by some other cruel mode of torturing.  They often boast of having invented some new mode of torture, by which they have “tamed the rascals,” What is called a moderate flogging at the south is horribly cruel.  Should we whip our horses for any offence as they whip their slaves for small offences, we should expose ourselves to the penalty of the law.  The masters whip for the smallest offences, such as not performing their tasks, being caught by the guard or patrol by night, or for taking any thing from the