“It is remarkable that the white creole women are ordinarily more inexorable than the men.  Their slow and languid gait, and the trifling services which they impose, betoken only apathetic indolence; but should the slave not promptly obey, should he even fail to divine the meaning of their gestures, or looks, in an instant they are armed with a formidable whip; it is no longer the arm which cannot sustain the weight of a shawl or a reticule—­it is no longer the form which but feebly sustains itself.  They themselves order the punishment of one of these poor creatures, and with a dry eye see their victim bound to four stakes; they count the blows, and raise a voice of menace, if the arm that strikes relaxes, or if the blood does not flow in sufficient abundance.  Their sensibility changed to fury must needs feed itself for a while on the hideous spectacle; they must, as if to revive themselves, hear the piercing shrieks, and see the flow of fresh blood; there are some of them who, in their frantic rage, pinch and bite their victims.

“It is by no means wonderful that the laws designed to protect the slave, should be little respected by the generality of such masters.  I have seen some masters pay those unfortunate people the miserable overcoat which is their due; but others give them nothing at all, and do not even leave them the hours and Sundays granted to them by law.  I have seen some of those barbarous masters leave them, during the winter, in a state of revolting nudity, even contrary to their own true interests, for they thus weaken and shorten the lives upon which repose the whole of their own fortunes.  I have seen some of those negroes obliged to conceal their nakedness with the long moss of the country.  The sad melancholy of these wretches, depicted upon their countenances, the flight of some, and the death of others, do not reclaim their masters; they wreak upon those who remain, the vengeance which they can no longer exercise upon the others.”

WHITMAN MEAD, Esq. of New York, in his journal, published nearly a quarter of a century ago, under date of

“SAVANNAH, January 28, 1817.

“To one not accustomed to such scenes as slavery presents, the condition of the slaves is impressively shocking. In the course of my walks, I was every where witness to their wretchedness.  Like the brute creatures of the north, they are driven about at the pleasure of all who meet them:  half naked and half starved, they drag out a pitiful existence, apparently almost unconscious of what they suffer.  A threat accompanies every command, and a bastinado is the usual reward of disobedience.”

TESTIMONY OF REV.  JOHN RANKIN,

A native of Tennessee, educated there, and for a number of years a preacher in slave states—­now pastor of a church in Ripley, Ohio.