Thomas N. Gadsden, Esq. the principal slave auctioneer in Charleston, S.C. is of one of the first families in the state, and moves in the very highest class of society there.  He is a descendant of the distinguished General Gadsden of revolutionary memory, the most prominent southern member in the Continental Congress of 1765, and afterwards elected lieutenant governor and then governor of the state.  The Rev. Dr. Gadsden, rector of St. Phillip’s Church, Charleston, and the Rev. Phillip Gadsden, both prominent Episcopal clergymen in South Carolina, and Colonel James Gadsden of the United States army, after whom a county in Florida was recently named, are all brothers of this Thomas N. Gadsden, Esq. the largest slave auctioneer in the state, under whose hammer, men, women and children go off by thousands; its stroke probably sunders daily, husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, perhaps to see each other’s faces no more.  Now who supply the auction table of this Thomas N. Gadsden, Esq. with its loads of human merchandize?  These same detested ’soul drivers’ forsooth!  They prowl through the country, buy, catch, and fetter them, and drive their chained coffles up to his stand, where Thomas N. Gadsden, Esq. knocks them off to the highest bidder, to Ex-Governor Butler perhaps, or to Ex-Governor Hayne, or to Hon. Robert Barnwell Rhett, or to his own reverend brother, Dr. Gadsden.  Now this high born, wholesale soul-seller doubtless despises the retail ‘soul-drivers’ who give him their custom, and so does the wholesale grocer, the drizzling tapster who sneaks up to his counter for a keg of whiskey to dole out under a shanty in two cent glasses; and both for the same reason.

The plea that the ‘public opinion’ among the highest classes of society at the south is mild and considerate towards the slaves, that they do not overwork, underfeed, neglect when old and sick, scantily clothe, badly lodge, and half shelter their slaves; that they do not barbarously flog, load with irons, imprison in the stocks, brand and maim them; hunt them when runaway with dogs and guns, and sunder by force and forever the nearest kindred—­is shown, by almost every page of this work, to be an assumption, not only utterly groundless, but directly opposed to masses of irrefragable evidence.  If the reader will be at the pains to review the testimony recorded on the foregoing pages he will find that a very large proportion of the atrocities detailed were committed, not by the most ignorant and lowest classes of society, but by persons ‘of property and standing,’ by masters and mistresses belonging to the ‘upper classes,’ by persons in the learned professions, by civil, judicial, and military officers, by the literati, by the fashionable elite and persons of more than ordinary ‘respectability’ and external morality—­large numbers of whom are professors of religion.

It will be recollected that the testimony of Sarah M. Grimke, and Angelina G. Weld, was confined exclusively to the details of slavery as exhibited in the highest classes of society, mainly in Charleston, S.C.  See their testimony pp. 22-24 and 52-57.  The former has furnished us with the following testimony in addition to that already given.