or who were branded with hot irons, or forced to wear iron yokes and clogs and bells; to the Presbyterian preacher in Georgia who tortured a slave until he died; to a woman in New Jersey who was “bound to a log, and scored with a knife, in a shocking manner, across her back, and the gashes stuffed with salt, after which she was tied to a post in a cellar, where, after suffering three days, death kindly terminated her misery”; and finally to the fact that even when slaves were dead they were not left in peace, as the South Carolina Medical College in Charleston advertised that the bodies were used for dissection.[1] In the face of such an indictment the South appeared more injured and innocent than ever, and said that evils had been greatly exaggerated.  Perhaps in some instances they were; but the South and everybody also knew that no pen could nearly do justice to some of the things that were possible under the iniquitous and abominable system of American slavery.

[Footnote 1:  See “American Slavery as it is:  Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.  By Theodore Dwight Weld.  Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, New York, 1839”; but the account of the New Jersey woman is from “A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States, by Jesse Torrey, Ballston Spa, Penn., 1917,” p. 67.]

The Abolitionists, however, did not stop with a mere attack on slavery.  Not satisfied with the mere enumeration of examples of Negro achievement, they made even higher claims in behalf of the people now oppressed.  Said Alexander H. Everett:[1] “We are sometimes told that all these efforts will be unavailing—­that the African is a degraded member of the human family—­that a man with a dark skin and curled hair is necessarily, as such, incapable of improvement and civilization, and condemned by the vice of his physical conformation to vegetate forever in a state of hopeless barbarism.  I reject with contempt and indignation this miserable heresy.  In replying to it the friends of truth and humanity have not hitherto done justice to the argument.  In order to prove that the blacks were capable of intellectual efforts, they have painfully collected a few specimens of what some of them have done in this way, even in the degraded condition which they occupy at present in Christendom.  This is not the way to treat the subject.  Go back to an earlier period in the history of our race.  See what the blacks were and what they did three thousand years ago, in the period of their greatness and glory, when they occupied the forefront in the march of civilization—­when they constituted in fact the whole civilized world of their time.  Trace this very civilization, of which we are so proud, to its origin, and see where you will find it.  We received it from our European ancestors:  they had it from the Greeks and Romans, and the Jews.  But, sir, where did the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews get it?  They derived it from Ethiopia and Egypt—­in one word,