Hon. W.B.  Seabrook, in an address before the Agricultural Society of St. John’s, Colleton, published by order of the Society, at Charleston, in 1834, after stating that “as Slavery exists in South Carolina, the action of the citizens should rigidly conform to that state of things:”  and, that “no abstract opinions of the rights of man should be allowed in any instance to modify the police system of a plantation,” proceeds as follows. “He (the slave) should be practically treated as a slave; and thoroughly taught the true cardinal principle on which our peculiar institutions are founded, viz.; that to his owner he is bound by the law of God and man; and that no human authority can sever the link which unites them.  The great aim of the slaveholder, then, should be to keep his people in strict subordination.  In this, it may in truth be said, lies his entire duty.”  Again, in speaking of the punishments of slaves, he remarks:  “If to our army the disuse of THE LASH has been prejudicial, to the slaveholder it would operate to deprive him of the MAIN SUPPORT of his authority.  For the first class of offences, I consider imprisonment in THE STOCKS[A] at night, with or without hard labor by day, as a powerful auxiliary in the cause of good government.” “Experience has convinced me that there is no punishment to which the slave looks with more horror, than that upon which I am commenting, (the stocks,) and none which has been attended with happier results.”

[Footnote A:  Of the nature of this punishment in the stocks, something may be learned by the following extract of a letter from a gentleman in Tallahassee, Florida, to the editor of the Ohio Atlas, dated June 9, 1835:  “A planter, a professer of religion, in conversing upon the universality of whipping, remarked, that a planter in G____, who had whipped a great deal, at length got tired of it, and invented the following excellent method of punishment, which I saw practised while I was paying him a visit.  The negro was placed in a sitting position, with his hands made fast above his head, and his feet in the stocks, so that he could not move any part of the body.  The master retired, intending to leave him till morning, but we were awakened in the night by the groans of the negro, which were so doleful that we feared he was dying.  We went to him, and found him covered with a cold sweat, and almost gone.  He could not have lived an hour longer.  Mr. ——­ found the ‘stocks’ such an effective punishment, that it almost superseded the whip.”]

There is yet another class of testimony quite as pertinent as the foregoing, which may at any time be gleaned from the newspapers of the slave states—­the advertisements of masters for their runaway slaves, and casual paragraphs coldly relating cruelties, which would disgrace a land of Heathenism.  Let the following suffice for a specimen: 

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