“On sugar plantations generally, and on some cotton plantations, they have negro drivers, who are in such a degree responsible for their gang, that if they are at fault, the driver is whipped.  The result is, the gang are constantly driven by him to the extent of the influence of the lash; and it is uniformly the case that gangs dread a negro driver more than a white overseer.

“I spent a winter on widow Culvert’s plantation, near Rodney, Mississippi, but was not in a situation to see extraordinary punishments.  Bellows, the overseer, for a trifling offence, took one of the slaves, stripped him, and with a piece of burning wood applied to his posteriors, burned him cruelly; while the poor wretch screamed in the greatest agony.  The principal preparation for punishment that Bellows had, was single handcuffs made of iron, with chains, by which the offender could be chained to four stakes on the ground.  These are very common in all the lower country.  I noticed one slave on widow Calvert’s plantation, who was whipped from twenty-five to fifty lashes every fortnight during the whole winter.  The expression ’whipped to death,’ as applied to slaves, is common at the south.

“Several years ago I was going below New Orleans, in what is called the Plaquemine country, and a planter sent down in my boat a runaway he had found in New Orleans, to his plantation at Orange 5 Points.  As we came near the Points he told me, with deep feeling, that he expected to be whipped almost to death:  pointing to a graveyard, he said, ‘There lie five who were whipped to death.’  Overseers generally keep some of the women on the plantation; I scarce know an exception to this.  Indeed, their intercourse with them is very much promiscuous,—­they show them not much, if any favor.  Masters frequently follow the example of their overseers in this thing.

“GEORGE W. WESTGATE.”

II.  TORTURES, BY IRON COLLARS, CHAINS, FETTERS, HANDCUFFS, &c.

The slaves are often tortured by iron collars, with long prongs or “horns” and sometimes bells attached to them—­they are made to wear chains, handcuffs, fetters, iron clogs, bars, rings, and bands of iron upon their limbs, iron masks upon their faces, iron gags in their mouths, &c.

In proof of this, we give the testimony of slaveholders themselves, under their own names; it will be mostly in the form of extracts from their own advertisements, in southern newspapers, in which, describing their runaway slaves, they specify the iron collars, handcuffs, chains, fetters, &c., which they wore upon their necks, wrists, ankles, and other parts of their bodies.  To publish the whole of each advertisement, would needlessly occupy space and tax the reader; we shall consequently, as heretofore, give merely the name of the advertiser, the name and date of the newspaper containing the advertisement, with the place of publication, and only so much of the advertisement as will give the particular fact, proving the truth of the assertion contained in the general head.