Though the people of the free states affect to disbelieve the cruelties perpetrated upon the slaves, yet slaveholders believe each other guilty of them, and speak of them with the utmost freedom.  If slaveholders disbelieve any statement of cruelty inflicted upon a slave, it is not on account of its enormity.  The traveler at the south will hear in Delaware, and in all parts of Maryland and Virginia, from the lips of slaveholders, statements of the most horrible cruelties suffered by the slaves farther south, in the Carolinas and Georgia; when he finds himself in those states he will hear similar accounts about the treatment of the slaves in Florida and Louisiana; and in Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee he will hear of the tragedies enacted on the plantations in Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi.  Since Anti-Slavery Societies have been in operation, and slaveholders have found themselves on trial before the world, and put upon their good behavior, northern slaveholders have grown cautious, and now often substitute denials and set defences, for the voluntary testimony about cruelty in the far south, which, before that period, was given with entire freedom.  Still, however, occasionally the ’truth will out,’ as the reader will see by the following testimony of an East Tennessee newspaper, in which, speaking of the droves of slaves taken from the upper country to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, etc., the editor says, they are ’traveling to a region where their condition through time WILL BE SECOND ONLY TO THAT OF THE WRETCHED CREATURES IN HELL.’  See “Maryville Intelligencer,” of Oct, 4, 1835.  Distant cruelties and cruelties long past, have been till recently, favorite topics with slaveholders.  They have not only been ready to acknowledge that their fathers have exercised great cruelty toward their slaves, but have voluntarily, in their official acts, made proclamation of it and entered it on their public records.  The Legislature of North Carolina, in 1798, branded the successive legislatures of that state for more than thirty years previous, with the infamy of treatment towards their slaves, which they pronounce to be ’disgraceful to humanity, and degrading in the highest degree to the laws and principles of a free, Christian, and enlightened country.’  This treatment was the enactment and perpetuation of a most barbarous and cruel law.

But enough.  As the objector can and does believe all the preceeding facts, if he still ‘can’t believe’ as to the cruelties of slaveholders, it would be barbarous to tantalize his incapacity either with evidence or argument.  Let him have the benefit of the act in such case made and provided.

Having shown that the incredulity of the objector respecting the cruelty inflicted upon the slaves, is discreditable to his consistency, we now proceed to show that it is equally so to his intelligence.