That the slaves were exposed to great misery in the islands, was true as well from inference as from facts:  for what might not be expected from the use of arbitrary power, where the three characters of party, judge, and executioner were united!  The slaves too were more capable on account of their passions, than the beasts of the field, of exciting the passions of their tyrants.  To what a length the ill treatment of them might be carried, might be learnt from the instance which General Tottenham mentioned to have seen in the year 1780 in the streets of Bridge Town, Barbadoes:  “A youth about nineteen (to use his own words in the evidence), entirely naked, with an iron collar about his neck, having five long projecting spikes.  His body both before and behind, was covered with wounds.  His belly and thighs were almost cut to pieces, with running ulcers all over them; and a finger might have been laid in some of the weals.  He could not sit down, because his hinder part was mortified; and it was impossible for him to lie down, on account of the prongs of his collar.”  He supplicated the General for relief.  The latter asked, who had punished him so dreadfully?  The youth answered, his master had done it.  And because he could not work, this same master, in the same spirit of perversion, which extorts from scripture a justification of the Slave-trade, had fulfilled the apostolic maxim, that he should have nothing to eat.  The use he meant to make of this instance was to show the unprotected state of the slaves.  What must it be, where such an instance could pass not only unpunished, but almost unregarded!  If, in the streets of London, but a dog were to be seen lacerated like this miserable man, how would the cruelty of the wretch be execrated, who had thus even abused a brute!

The judicial punishments also inflicted upon the Negro showed the low estimation, in which, in consequence of the strength of old customs and deep-rooted prejudices, they were held.  Mr. Edwards, in his speech to the Assembly at Jamaica, stated the following case, as one which had happened in one of the rebellions there.  Some slaves surrounded the dwelling-house of their mistress.  She was in bed with a lovely infant.  They deliberated upon the means of putting her to death in torment.  But in the end one of them reserved her for his mistress; and they killed her infant with an axe before her face.  “Now,” says Mr. Edwards, (addressing himself to his audience,) “you will think that no torments were too great for such horrible excesses.  Nevertheless I am of a different opinion.  I think that death, unaccompanied with cruelty, should be the utmost exertion of human authority over our unhappy fellow-creatures.”  Torments, however, were always inflicted in these cases.  The punishment was gibbeting alive, and exposing the delinquents to perish by the gradual effects of hunger, thirst, and a parching sun; in which situation they were known to suffer for nine days, with a fortitude