Rev. HORACE MOULTON, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in Marlborough, Mass. who lived some years in Georgia, says:
“The southern horses and dogs have enough to eat, and good care is taken of them; but southern negroes—who can describe their misery and their wretchedness, their nakedness and their cruel scourgings! None but God. Should we whip our horses as they whip their slaves, even for small offences, we should expose ourselves to the penalty of the law.”
Rev. PHINEAS SMITH, Centerville, Allegany county, New York, who has resided four years in the midst of southern slavery—
“Avarice and cruelty are twin sisters; and I do not hesitate to declare before the world, as my deliberate opinion, that there is less compassion for working slaves at the south, than for working oxen at the north.”
STEVEN SEWALL, Esq. Winthrop, Maine, a member of the Congregational Church, and late agent of the Winthrop Manufacturing Company, who resided five years in Alabama, says—
“I do not think that brutes, not even horses, are treated with so much cruelty as American slaves.”
If the preceding considerations are insufficient to remove incredulity respecting the cruelties suffered by slaves, and if northern objectors still say, ’We might believe such things of savages, but that civilized men, and republicans, in this Christian country, can openly and by system perpetrate such enormities, is impossible’;—to such we reply, that this incredulity of the people of the free states, is not only discreditable to their intelligence, but to their consistency.
Who is so ignorant as not to know, or so incredulous as to disbelieve, that the early Baptists of New England were fined, imprisoned, scourged, and finally banished by our puritan forefathers?—and that the Quakers were confined in dungeons, publicly whipped at the cart-tail, had their ears cut off, cleft sticks put upon their tongues, and that five of them, four men and one woman, were hung on Boston Common, for propagating the sentiments of the Society of Friends? Who discredits the fact, that the civil authorities in Massachusetts, less than a hundred and fifty years ago, confined in the public jail a little girl of four years old, and publicly hung the Rev. Mr. Burroughs, and eighteen other persons, mostly women, and killed another, (Giles Corey,) by extending him upon his back, and piling weights upon his breast till he was crushed to death [17]—and this for no other reason than that these men and women, and this little child, were accused by others of bewitching them.
[Footnote 17: Judge Sewall, of Mass. in his diary, describing this horrible scene, says that when the tongue of the poor sufferer had, in the extremity of his dying agony, protruded from his mouth, a person in attendance took his cane and thrust it back into his mouth.]
Even the children in Connecticut, know that the following was once a law of that state: