“Nathaniel Heyward of Combahee, S.C., one of the wealthiest planters in the state, stated, in conversation with some other planters who were complaining of the idle and lazy habits of their slaves, and the difficulty of ascertaining whether their sickness was real or pretended, and the loss they suffered from their frequent absence on this account from their work, said, ’I never lose a day’s work:  it is an established rule on my plantations that the tasks of all the sick negroes shall be done by those who are well in addition to their own.  By this means a vigilant supervision is kept up by the slaves over each other, and they take care that nothing but real sickness keeps any one out of the field.’  I spent several winters in the neighborhood of Nathaniel Heyward’s plantations, and well remember his character as a severe task master. I was present when the above statement was made.”

The cool barbarity of such a regulation is hardly surpassed by the worst edicts of the Roman Caligula—­especially when we consider that the plantations of this man were in the neighborhood of the Combahee river, one of the most unhealthy districts in the low country of South Carolina; further, that large numbers of his slaves worked in the rice marshes, or ‘swamps’ as they are called in that state—­and that during six months of the year, so fatal to health is the malaria of the swamps in that region that the planters and their families invariably abandon their plantations, regarding it as downright presumption to spend a single day upon them ‘between the frosts’ of the early spring and the last of November.

The reader may infer the high standing of Mr. Heyward in South Carolina, from the fact that he was selected with four other freeholders to constitute a Court for the trial of the conspirators in the insurrection plot at Charleston, in 1822.  Another of the individuals chosen to constitute that court was Colonel Henry Deas, now president of the Board of Trustees of Charleston College, and a few years since a member of the Senate of South Carolina.  From a late correspondence in the “Greenvile (S.C.) Mountaineer,” between Rev. William M. Wightman, a professor in Randolph, Macon, College, and a number of the citizens of Lodi, South Carolina, it appears that the cruelty of this Colonel Deas to his slaves, is proverbial in South Carolina, so much that Professor Wightman, in the sermon which occasioned the correspondence, spoke of the Colonel’s inhumanity to his slaves as a matter of perfect notoriety.

Another South Carolina slaveholder, Hon. Whitmarsh B. Seabrook, recently, we believe, Lieut.  Governor of the state, gives the following testimony to his own inhumanity, and his certificate of the ‘public opinion’ among South Carolina slaveholders ‘of high degree.’

In an essay on the management of slaves, read before the Agricultural Society of St. Johns, S.C. and published by the Society, Charleston, 1834, Mr. S. remarks: