American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses

GENERAL TESTIMONY TO THE CRUELTIES INFLICTED UPON SLAVES.

 149 victim! every human susceptibility tortured, its sympathies torn, and stung, and bleeding—always feeling the death-weapon in its heart, and yet not so deep as to kill that humanity which is made the curse of its existence. In the course of my testimony I have entered somewhat into the minutiæ of slavery, because this is a part of the subject often overlooked, and cannot be appreciated by any but those who have been witnesses, and entered into sympathy with the slaves as human beings. Slaveholders think nothing of them, because they regard their slaves as property, the mere instruments of their convenience and pleasure. One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognises a human being in a slave. As thou hast asked me to testify respecting the physical condition of the slaves merely, I say nothing of the awful neglect of their minds and souls and the systematic effort to imbrute them. A wrong and an impiety, in comparison with which all the other unutterable wrongs of slavery are but as the dust of the balance. ANGELINA G. WELD. GENERAL TESTIMONY TO THE CRUELTIES INFLICTED UPON SLAVES. Before presenting to the reader particular details of the cruelties inflicted upon American slaves, we will present in brief the well-weighed declarations of slaveholders and other residents of slave states, testifying that the slaves are treated with barbarous inhumanity. All details and particulars will be drawn out under their appropriate heads. We propose in this place to present testimony of a general character—the solemn declarations of slaveholders and others, that the slaves are treated with great cruelty. To discredit the testimony of witnesses who insist upon convicting themselves, would be an anomalous scepticism. To show that American slavery has always had one uniform character of diabolical cruelty, we will go back one hundred years, and prove it by unimpeachable witnesses, who have given their deliberate testimony to its horrid barbarity, from 1739 to 1839. 150  TESTIMONY OF REV. GEORGE WHITEFIELD, In a letter written by him in Georgia, and addressed to the slaveholders of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, in 1739.—See Benezet's "Caution to Great Britain and her Colonies." "As I lately passed through your provinces on my way hither, I was sensibly touched with a fellow-feeling of the miseries of the poor negroes. "Sure I am, it is sinful to use them as bad, nay worse than if they were brutes; and whatever particular exceptions there may be, (as I would charitably hope there are some,) I fear the generality of you that own negroes, are liable to such a charge. Not to mention what numbers have been given up to the inhuman usage of cruel taskmasters, who by their unrelenting scourges, have ploughed their backs and made long furrows, and at length brought them to the grave! "The blood of them, spilt for these many years, in your respective provinces , will ascend up to heaven against you!" The following is the testimony of the celebrated JOHN WOOLMAN, an eminent minister of [Page 58] the Society of Friends, who traveled extensively in the slave states. We copy it from a "Memoir of JOHN WOOLMAN, chiefly extracted from a Journal of his Life and Travels." It was published in Philadelphia, by the "Society of Friends." "The following reflections, were written in 1757, while he was traveling on a religious account among slaveholders." "Many of the white people in these provinces, take little or no care of negro marriages; and when negroes marry, after their own way, some make so little account of those marriages, that, with views of outward interest, they often part men from their wives, by selling them far asunder; which is common when estates are sold by executors at vendue. "Many whose labor is heavy, being followed at their business in the field by a man with a whip, hired for that purpose,—have in common, little else allowed them but one peck of Indian corn and some salt for one week, with a few potatoes. (The potatoes they commonly raise by their labor on the first day of the week.) The correction ensuing on their disobedience to overseers, or slothfulness in business, is often very severe, and sometimes desperate. Men and women have many times scarce clothes enough to hide their nakedness—and boys and girls, ten and twelve years old, are often quite naked among their masters' children. Some use endeavors to instruct [3.139.97.157...