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THE BARBARISM OF SLAVERY.

SPEECH IN THE Senate, on the Bill for the Admission of KanSAS AS A FREE STATE, June 4, 1860.

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Thou art a slave, whom Fortune's tender arm

With favor never clasped, but bred a dog.

SHAKESPEARE, Timon of Athens, Act IV. Sc. 3.

A universe of death, which God by curse

Created evil, for evil only good,

Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,

Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things.

Onward! onward!

MILTON, Paradise Lost, Book II. 622-625.

With the night-wind,

Over field and farm and forest,

Lonely homestead, darksome hamlet,

Blighting all we breathe upon!

LONGFELLOW, Golden Legend.

Instrumenti genus vocale, et semivocale, et mutum: vocale, in quo sunt servi; semivocale, in quo sunt boves; mutum, in quo sunt plaustra. — VARRO, De Re Rustica, Lib. I. cap. xvii. § 1.

Nil metuunt jurare, nihil promittere parcunt;

Dicta nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant.

CATULLUS, Carm. LXIV. 146, 148.

Pone crucem servo.

Meruit quo crimine servus
Supplicium? quis testis adest? quis detulit? Audi:
Nulla unquam de morte hominis cunctatio longa est. -
O demens, ita servus homo est? Nil fecerit, esto:
Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas.

JUVENAL, Sat. VI. 219–223.

There is a tradition of the Prophet having said, that the greatest mortification at the Day of Judgment will be when the pious slave is carried to Paradise and the wicked master condemned to Hell.-SAADI, The Gulistan, tr. Gladwin, p. 242.

"And the Black Oppressor am I called. And for this reason I am called the Black Oppressor, that there is not a single man around me whom I have not oppressed, and justice have I done unto none." "Since thon hast, indeed, been an oppressor so long," said Peredur, "I will cause that thou continue so no longer." So he slew him. The Mabinogion, tr. Lady Charlotte Guest, Vol. I. pp. 341, 342.

After we had secured these people, I called the linguists, and ordered them to bid the men-negroes between decks be quiet (for there was a great noise amongst them). On their being silent, I asked, What had induced them to mutiny? They answered, I was a great rogue to buy them in order to carry them away from their own country, and that they were resolved to regain their liberty, if possible. SNELGRAVE, New Account

of some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade, p. 170.

A system of concubinage was practised among them worse than the loose polygamy of the savages: the savage had as many women as consented to become his wives; the colonist as many as he could enslave. There is an ineffaceable stigma upon the Europeans in their intercourse with those whom they treat as inferior races; there is a perpetual contradiction between their lust and their avarice. The planter will one day take a slave for his harlot, and sell her the next as a being of some lower species, a beast of labor. If she be indeed an inferior animal, what shall be said of the one action? If she be equally with himself a human being and an immortal soul, what shall be said of the other? Either way there is a crime committed against human nature. - SOUTHEY, History of Brazil, Chap. VIII., Vol. I. p. 258.

Negro slavery exists in no part of the world without producing indolence, licentiousness, and inhumanity in the whites; and these vices draw after them their earthly punishment, -to look no farther into their fearful, but assured consequences. IBID., Chap. XLIV., Vol. III. p. 816.

I had observed much, and heard more, of the cruelty of masters towards their negroes; but now I received an authentic account of some horrid instances thereof. The giving a child a slave of its own age to tyrannize over, to beat and abuse out of sport, was, I myself saw, a common practice. Nor is it strange, being thus trained up in cruelty, they should after

wards arrive at so great perfection in it; that Mr. Star, a gentleman I often met at Mr. Lasserre's, should, as he himself informed L., first nail up a negro by the ears, then order him to be whipped in the severest manner, and then to have scalding water thrown over him, so that the poor creature could not stir for four months after. Another much applauded punishment is drawing their slaves' teeth. One Colonel LYNCH is universally known to have cut off a poor negro's legs, and to kill several of them every year by his barbarities. - REV. CHARLES WESLEY, Journal, Charleston, S. C, August 2, 1736.

You are to have no regard to the health, strength, comfort, natural affections, or moral feelings, or intellectual endowments of my negroes. You are only to consider what subsistence to allow them and what labor to exact of them will subserve my interest. According to the most accurate calculation I can make, the proportion of subsistence and labor which will work them up in six years upon an average is the most profitable to the planter. And this allowance, surely, is very humane; for we estimate here the lives of our coal-heavers, upon an average, at only two years, . . . . and our soldiers and seamen no matter what. - A West-India Planter's Instructions for his Overseers: JOHN ADAMS, Works, Vol. X. pp. 339, 340.

The unfortunate man would have been tried upon five other indictments, some of them still more atrocious than the one upon which he was found guilty; and his general character for barbarity was so notorious that no room was left for me even to deliberate. His victims have been numerous; some of them were even buried in their chains, and there have been found upon the bones taken from the grave chains and iron rings of near forty pounds' weight. . . . . He had been three times married, has left several children; he had been in the Army, had a liberal education, and lived in what is called the great world. His manners and address were those of a gentleman. Cruelty appears in him to have been the effect of violence of temper, and habit had made him regardless of the death and suffering of a slave. RIGHT HON. HUGH ELLIOT, Governor of the Leeward Islands: Memoir, by the COUNTESS OF MINTO, pp 409, 410.

Is slavery less slavery in a Christian than in a Mahometan country? I entreat your attention, while I plead the general cause of humanity. In such a cause it is right to appeal to your sensibility as well as your reason. It is now no longer time to flatter petty tyrants by acknowledging that color constitutes a legitimate title for holding men in abject and perpetual bondage. In support of this usurpation what can be urged but the law of the strongest? - COL. DAVID HUMPHREYS, Valedictory Discourse before the Cincinnati of Connecticut, July 4, 1804, p. 29.

Christianity suppressed slavery, but the Christians of the sixteenth century reestablished it,—as an exception, indeed, to their social system, and restricted to one of the races of mankind; but the wound thus inflicted

upon humanity, though less extensive, was far more difficult of cure. TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America, ed. Bowen, Chap. XVIII. sec. 2, Vol. I. p. 457.

The Kentuckian delights in violent bodily exertion; he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat. . . Were I inclined to continue this parallel, I could easily prove that almost all the differences which may be remarked between the characters of the Americans in the Southern and in the Northern States have originated in Slavery. IBID., pp. 467, 468.

I visited our State Penitentiary a short time since, and from my own personal observation I am led to the inevitable conclusion that the plan of sending our slaves to the Penitentiary, as a punishment for crime, is exactly the reverse: it is rather a reward than punishment. "Let sober reason judge."

We punish offenders to prevent crime. I would ask any reasonable man, Is the sending a slave of any of our farms to the Penitentiary a punishment? The white man is punished by being deprived of his liberty for that length of time: what liberty is the slave deprived of? He has as much, and oftentimes more, liberty within the walls of the Penitentiary than on any of those large sugar or cotton plantations. Then where is the punishment? We send white men there, and the dread of going is a stain on his character what character has the negro to lose? Hence we must come to the conclusion that sending negro slaves to the Penitentiary is not a punishment.

A moment's reflection will convince any man who has ever had the management of negroes on a plantation, that the well-being and safety of societies demand that any offence committed by a negro, for which the lash is not a sufficient punishment, death should be the penalty.

Taking these things into consideration, would it not be just and laudable to sell all negroes now in the Penitentiary to the highest bidder, on or about the first of November next, by the Sheriff of the Parish of East Baton Rouge, on the same terms and conditions that negroes are sold at present, under an ordinary fi. fa., and, as near as can be, two thirds of the net proceeds of each negro be paid to the former owners or their legal representatives, the balance be and remain in the State Treasury for ordinary purposes? Weekly Advocate, Baton Rouge, La., Jan. 17, 1858.

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