“Kyle immediately arranged his affairs, packed up his tools and prepared to depart.  ‘Where are you going?’ demanded Lewis.  ’I am going home;’ said Kyle.  ’Then I will pay you nothing for what you have done,’ retorted the slave driver, ’unless you complete your contract.’  The carpenter went away with this edifying declaration, ’I will not stay here a day longer; for I expect the fire of God will come down and burn you up altogether, and I do not choose to go to hell with you.’  Through hush-money and promises not to whip the women any more, I believe Kyle returned and completed his engagement.

“James Kyle of Harrisonburg, Virginia, frequently narrated that circumstance, and his son, the carpenter, confirmed it with all the minute particulars combined with his temporary residence on the Shenandoah river.

“John M’Cue of Augusta county, Virginia, a Presbyterian preacher, frequently on the Lord’s day morning, tied up his slaves and whipped them; and left them bound, while he went to the meeting house and preached—­and after his return home repeated his scourging.  That fact, with others more heinous, was known to all persons in his congregation and around the vicinity; and so far from being censured for it, he and his brethren justified it as essential to preserve their ‘domestic institutions.’

“Mrs. Pence, of Rockingham county, Virginia, used to boast,—­’I am the best hand to whip a wench in the whole county.’  She used to pinion the girls to a post in the yard on the Lord’s day morning, scourge them, put on the ‘negro plaster,’ salt, pepper, and vinegar, leave them tied, and walk away to church as demure as a nun, and after service repeat her flaying, if she felt the whim.  I once expostulated with her upon her cruelly.  ’Mrs. Pence, how can you whip your girls so publicly and disturb your neighbors so on the Lord’s day morning.’  Her answer was memorable.  ’If I were to whip them on any other day I should lose a day’s work; but by whipping them on Sunday, their backs get well enough by Monday morning.’  That woman, if alive, is doubtless a member of the church now, as then.

“Rev. Dr. Staughton, formerly of Philadelphia, often stated, that when he lived at Georgetown, S.C. he could tell the doings of one of the slaveholders of the Baptist church there by his prayers at the prayer meeting.  ‘If,’ said he, ’that man was upon good terms with his slaves, his words were cold and heartless as frost; if he had been whipping a man, he would pray with life; but if he had left a woman whom he had been flogging, tied to a post in his cellar, with a determination to go back and torture her again, O! how he would pray!’ The Rev. Cyrus P. Grosvenor of Massachusetts can confirm the above statement by Dr. Staughton.