The slave suffers also greatly from being continually watched.  The system of espionage which is constantly kept up over slaves is the most worrying and intolerable that can be imagined.  Many mistresses are, in fact, during the absence of their husbands, really their drivers; and the pleasure of returning to their families often, on the part of the husband, is entirely destroyed by the complaints preferred against the slaves when he comes home to his meals.

A mistress of my acquaintance asked her servant boy, one day, what was the reason she could not get him to do his work whilst his master was away, and said to him, “Your master works a great deal harder than you do; he is at his office all day, and often has to study his law cases at night.”  “Master,” said the boy, “is working for himself, and for you, ma’am, but I am working for him”.  The mistress turned and remarked to a friend, that she was so struck with the truth of the remark, that she could not say a word to him.  But I forbear—­the sufferings of the slaves are not only innumerable, but they are indescribable.  I may paint the agony of kindred torn from each other’s arms, to meet no more in time; I may depict the inflictions of the blood-stained lash, but I cannot describe the daily, hourly, ceaseless torture, endured by the heart that is constantly trampled under the foot of despotic power.  This is a part of the horrors of slavery which, I believe, no one has ever attempted to delineate; I wonder not at it, it mocks all power of language.  Who can describe the anguish of that mind which feels itself impaled upon the iron of arbitrary power—­its living, writhing, helpless victim! every human susceptibility tortured, its sympathies torn, and stung, and bleeding—­always feeling the death-weapon in its heart, and yet not so deep as to kill that humanity which is made the curse of Its existence.

In the course of my testimony I have entered somewhat into the minutiae of slavery, because this is a part of the subject often overlooked, and cannot be appreciated by any but those who have been witnesses, and entered into sympathy with the slaves as human beings.  Slaveholders think nothing of them, because they regard their slaves as property, the mere instruments of their convenience and pleasure. One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognises a human being in a slave.

As thou hast asked me to testify respecting the physical condition of the slaves merely, I say nothing of the awful neglect of their minds and souls and the systematic effort to imbrute them.  A wrong and an impiety, in comparison with which all the other unutterable wrongs of slavery are but as the dust of the balance.

ANGELINA G. WELD.

GENERAL TESTIMONY

TO THE CRUELTIES INFLICTED UPON SLAVES.