American Slavery As It Is

Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses

Theodore Dwight Weld

• Publisher: UNC at Chapel Hill Library
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780807869574
• eBook ISBN: 9780807869581
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Compiled by a prominent abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is combines information taken from witnesses, and from active and former slave owners, to generate a condemnation of slavery from both those who observed it and those who perpetuated it. The narrative describes the appalling day-to-day conditions of the over 2,700,000 men, women and children in slavery in the United States. Weld demonstrates how even prisoners--in the United States and in other countries--were significantly better fed than American slaves. Readers will find one of the most meticulous records of slave life available in this text. Unlike personal slave narratives, which focus on a single man or woman's experience, American Slavery details the overall conditions of slaves across multiple states and several years.

A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available in paperback and e-book formats. Each book contains a short summary and is otherwise unaltered from the original publication. DocSouth Books provide affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.

[Page 110] OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.

OBJECTION I.—“SUCH CRUELTIES ARE INCREDIBLE.”

THE enormities inflicted by slaveholders upon their slaves will never be discredited except by those who overlook the simple fact, that he who holds human beings as his bona fide property, regards them as property, and not as persons; this is his permanent state of mind toward them. He does not contemplate slaves as human beings, consequently does not treat them as such; and with entire indifference sees them suffer privations and writhe under blows, which, if inflicted upon whites, would fill him with horror and indignation. He regards that as good treatment of slaves, which would seem to him insufferable abuse if practiced upon others; and would denounce that as a monstrous outrage and horrible cruelty, if perpretated upon white men and women, which he sees every day meted out to black slaves, without perhaps ever thinking it cruel. Accustomed all his life to regard them rather as domestic animals, to hear them stormed at, and to see them cuffed and caned; and being himself in the constant habit of treating them thus, such practices have become to him a mere matter of course, and make no impression on his mind. True, it is incredible that men should treat as chattels those whom they truly regard as human beings; but that they should treat as chattels and working animals those whom they regard as such, is no marvel. The common treatment of dogs, when they are in the way, is to kick them out of it; we see them every day kicked off the side-walks, and out of shops, and on Sabbaths out of churches,—yet, as they are but dogs, these do not strike us as outrages; yet, if we were to see men, women, and children—our neighbors and friends, kicked out of stores by merchants, or out of churches by the deacons and sexton, we should call the perpetrators inhuman wretches.

We have said that slaveholders regard their slaves not as human beings, but as mere working animals, or merchandise. The whole vocabulary of slaveholders, their laws, their usages, and their entire treatment of their slaves fully establish this. The same terms are applied to slaves that are given to cattle. They are called “stock.” So when the children of slaves are spoken of prospectively, they are called their “increase;” the same term that is applied to flocks and herds. So the female slaves that are mothers, are called “breeders” till past child bearing; and often the same terms are applied to the different sexes that are applied to the males and females among cattle. Those who compel the labor of slaves and cattle have the same appellation, “drivers:” the names which they call them are the same and simiilar to those given to their horses and oxen. The laws of slave states make them property, equally with goats and swine; they are levied upon for debt in the same way; they are included in the same advertisements of public sales with cattle, swine, and asses; when moved from one part of the country to another, they are herded in droves like cattle, and like them urged on by drivers; their labor is compelled in the same way. They are bought and sold, and separated like cattle: when exposed for sale, their good qualities are described as jockies show off the good points of their horses; their strength, activity, skill, power of endurance, &c. are lauded,—and those who bid upon them examine their persons, just as purchasers inspect horses and oxen; they open their mouths to see if their teeth are sound; strip their backs to see if they are badly scarred, and handle their limbs and muscles to see if they are firmly knit. Like horses, they are warranted to be “sound,” or to be returned to the owner if “unsound.” A father gives his son a horse and a slave; by his will he distributes among them his race-horses, hounds, game-cocks, and slaves. We leave the reader to carry out the parallel which we have only begun. Its details would cover many pages.

That slaveholders do not practically regard slaves as human beings is abundantly shown by their own voluntary testimony. In a recent work entitled, “The South vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of Northern Abolitionists,” which was written, we are informed, by Colonel Dayton, late member of Congress from South Carolina; the writer, speaking of the awe with which the slaves regard the whites, says,—

“The northerner looks upon a band of negroes as upon so many men, but the planter or southerner views them in a very different light.”

Extract from the speech of Mr. SUMMERS, of Virginia, in the legislature of that state, Jan. 26, 1832. See the Richmond Whig.

“When, in the sublime lessons of Christianity, he (the slaveholder) is taught to ‘do unto others as he would have others do unto him,’ HE NEVER DREAMS THAT THE DEGRADED NEGRO IS WITHIN THE PALE OF THAT HOLY CANON.”

PRESIDENT JEFFERSON, in his letter to GOVERNOR COLES, of Illinois, dated Aug. 25, 1814, asserts, that slaveholders regard their slaves as brutes, in the following remarkable language.

“Nursed and educated in the daily habit of seeing the degraded condition, both bodily and mental, of these unfortunate beings [the slaves], FEW MINDS HAVE YET DOUBTED BUT THAT THEY WERE AS [Page 111] LEGITIMATE SUBJECTS OF PROPERTY AS THEIR HORSES OR CATTLE.”

Having shown that slaveholders regard their slaves as mere working animals and cattle, we now proceed to show that their actual treatment of them, is worse than it would be if they were brutes. We repeat it, SLAVEHOLDERS TREAT THEIR SLAVES WORSE THAN THEY DO THEIR BRUTES. Whoever heard of cows or sheep being deliberately tied up and beaten and lacerated till they died? or horses coolly tortured by the hour, till covered with mangled flesh, or of swine having their legs tied and being suspended from a tree and lacerated with thongs for hours, or of hounds stretched and made fast at full length, flayed with whips, red pepper rubbed into their bleeding gashes, and hot brine dashed on to aggravate the torture? Yet just such forms and degrees of torture are daily perpetrated upon the slaves. Now no man that knows human nature will marvel at this. Though great cruelties have always been inflicted by men upon brutes, yet incomparably the most horrid ever perpetrated, have been those of men upon their own species. Any leaf of history turned over at random has proof enough of this. Every reflecting mind perceives that when men hold human beings as property, they must, from the nature of the case, treat them worse than they treat their horses and oxen. It is impossible for cattle to excite in men such tempests of fury as men excite in each other. Men are often provoked if their horses or hounds refuse to do, or their pigs refuse to go where they wish to drive them, but the feeling is rarely intense and never permanent. It is vexation and impatience, rather than settled rage, malignity, or revenge. If horses and dogs were intelligent beings, and still held as property, their opposition to the wishes of their owners, would exasperate them immeasurably more than it would be possible for them to do, with the minds of brutes. None but little children and idiots get angry at sticks and stones that lie in their way or hurt them; but put into sticks and stones intelligence, and will, and power of feeling and motion, while they remain as now, articles of property, and what a towering rage would men be in, if bushes whipped them in the face when they walked among them, or stones rolled over their toes when they climbed hills! and what exemplary vengeance would be inflicted upon door-steps and hearth-stones, if they were to move out of their places, instead of lying still where they were put for their owners to tread upon. The greatest provocation to human nature is opposition to its will. If a man’s will be resisted by one far below him, the provocation is vastly greater, than when it is resisted by an acknowledged superior. In the former case, it inflames strong passions, which in the latter lie dormant. The rage of proud Haman knew no bounds against the poor Jew who would not do as he wished, and so he built a gallows for him. If the person opposing the will of another, be so far below him as to be on a level with chattels, and be actually held and used as an article of property; pride, scorn, lust of power, rage and revenge explode together upon the hapless victim. The idea of property having a will, and that too in opposition to the will of its owner, and counteracting it, is a stimulant of terrible power to the most relentless human passions and from the nature of slavery, and the constitution of the human mind, this fierce stimulant must, with various degrees of strength, act upon slaveholders almost without ceasing. The slave, however abject and crushed, is an intelligent being: he has a will, and that will cannot be annihilated, it will show itself; if for a moment it is smothered, like pent up fires when vent is found, it flames the fiercer. Make intelligence property, and its manager will have his match; he is met at every turn by an opposing will, not in the form of down-right rebellion and defiance, but yet, visibly, an ever-opposing will. He sees it in the dissatisfied look, and reluctant air and unwilling movement; the constrained strokes of labor, the drawling tones, the slow hearing, the feigned stupidity, the sham pains and sickness, the short memory; and he feels it every hour, in innumerable forms, frustrating his designs by a ceaseless though perhaps invisible countermining. This unceasing opposition to the will of its ‘owner,’ on the part of his rational ‘property,’ is to the slaveholder as the hot iron to the nerve. He raves under it, and storms, and gnashes, and smites; but the more he smites, the hotter it gets, and the more it burns him. Further, this opposition of the slave’s will to his owner’s, not only excites him to severity, that he may gratify his rage, but makes it necessary for him to use violence in breaking down this resistance—thus subjecting the slave to additional tortures. There is another inducement to cruel inflictions upon the slave, and a necessity for it, which does not exist in the case of brutes. Offenders must be made an example to others, to strike them with terror. If a slave runs away and is caught, his master flogs him with terrible severity, not merely to gratify his resentment, and to keep him from running away again, but as a warning to others. So in every case of disobedience, neglect, stubbornness, unfaithfulness, indolence, insolence, theft, feigned sickness, when his directions are forgotten, or slighted, or supposed to be, or his wishes crossed, or his property injured, or left exposed, or his work ill-executed, the master is tempted to inflict cruelties, not merely to wreak his own vengeance upon him, and to make the [Page 112] slave more circumspect in future, but to sustain his authority over the other slaves, to restrain them from like practices, and to preserve his own property.

A multitude of facts, illustrating the position that slaveholders treat their slaves worse than they do their cattle, will occur to all who are familiar with slavery. When cattle break through their owners’ inclosures and escape, if found, they are driven back and fastened in again; and even slaveholders would execrate as a wretch, the man who should tie them up, and bruise and lacerate them for straying away; but when slaves that have escaped are caught, they are flogged with the most terrible severity. When herds of cattle are driven to market, they are suffered to go in the easiest way, each by himself; but when slaves are driven to market, they are fastened together with handcuffs, galled by iron collars and chains, and thus forced to travel on foot hundreds of miles, sleeping at night in their chains. Sheep, and sometimes horned cattle are marked with their owners’ initials—but this is generally done with paint, and of course produces no pain. Slaves, too, are often marked with their owners’ initials, but the letters are stamped into their flesh with a hot iron. Cattle are suffered to graze their pastures without stint; but the slaves are restrained in their food to a fixed allowance. The slaveholders’ horses are notoriously far better fed, more moderately worked, have fewer hours of labor, and longer intervals of rest than their slaves; and their valuable horses are far more comfortably housed and lodged, and their stables more effectually defended from the weather, than the slaves’ huts. We have here merely begun a comparison, which the reader can easily carry out at length, from the materials furnished in this work.

We will, however, subjoin a few testimonies of slaveholders, and others who have resided in slave states, expressly asserting that slaves are treated worse than brutes.

The late Dr. GEORGE BUCHANAN, of Baltimore, Maryland, a member of the American Philosophical Society, in an oration delivered in Baltimore, July 4, 1791, page 10, says:

“The Africans whom you despise, whom you more inhumanly treat than brutes, are equally capable of improvement with yourselves.”

The Rev. GEORGE WHITEFIELD, in his celebrated letter to the slaveholders of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, written one hundred years ago, (See Benezet’s Caution to Great Britain and her Colonies, page 13), says:

“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 chariablty hope there are some) I fear the generality of you that own negroes, are liable to such a charge.”

Mr. RICE, of Kentucky in his speech in the Convention that formed the Constitution of that state, in 1790, says:

“He [the slave] is a rational creature, reduced by the power of legislation to the state of a brute, and thereby deprived of every privilege of humanity. . . . The brute may steal or rob, to supply his hunger; but the slave, though in the most starving condition, dare not do either, on penalty of death, or some severe punishment.”

Rev. HORACE MOULTON, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in Marlborough, Mass. who lived some years in Georgia, says:

“The southern horses and dogs have enough to eat, and good care is taken of them; but southern negroes—who can describe their misery and their wretchedness, their nakedness and their cruel scourgings! None but God. Should we whip our horses as they whip their slaves, even for small offences, we should expose ourselves to the penalty of the law.”

Rev. PHINEAS SMITH, Centreville, Allegany county, New York, who has resided four years in the midst of southern slavery—

“Avarice and cruelty are twin sisters; and I do not hesitate to declare before the world, as my deliberate opinion, that there is less compassion for working slaves at the south, than for working oxen at the north.”

STEPHEN SEWALL, Esq. Winthrop, Maine, a member of the Congregational Church, and late agent of the Winthrop Manufacturing Company, who resided five years in Alabama, says—

“I do not think that brutes, not even horses, are treated with so much cruelty as American slaves.”

If the preceding considerations are insufficient to remove incredulity respecting the cruelties suffered by slaves, and if northern objectors still say, ‘We might believe such things of savages, but that civilized men, and republicans, in this Christian country, can openly and by system perpetrate such enormities, is impossible;’—to such we reply, that this incredulity of the people of the free states, is not only discreditable to their intelligence, but to their consistency.

Who is so ignorant as not to know, or so incredulous as to disbelieve, that the early Baptists of New England were fined, imprisoned, scourged, and finally banished by our puritan fore-fathers?—and that the Quakers were confined in dungeons, publicly whipped at the cart-tail, had their ears cut off, cleft sticks put upon their tongues, and that five of them, four men and one woman, were hung on Boston Common, for propagating the sentiments of the Society of Friends? Who discredits the fact, that the civil authorities in Massachusetts, less than a hundred and fifty [Page 113] years ago, confined in the public jail a little girl of four years old, and publicly hung the Rev. Mr. Burroughs, and eighteen other persons, mostly women, and killed another, (Giles Corcy,) by extending him upon his back, and piling weights upon his breast till he was crushed to death* —and this for no other reason than that these men and women, and this little child, were accused by others of bewitching them. Even the children in Connecticut, know that the following was once a law of that state:

“No food or lodging shall be allowed to a Quaker. If any person turns Quaker, he shall be banished, and not be suffered to return on pain of death.”

These objectors can readily believe the fact, that in the city o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About This Edition
• AMERICAN SLAVERY AS IT IS: TESTIMONY OF A THOUSAND WITNESSES.
• ADVERTISEMENT TO THE READER.
• NOTE
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PERSONAL NARRATIVES
• PRIVATIONS OF THE SLAVES
• PERSONAL NARRATIVES—PART II
• PERSONAL NARRATIVES—PART III
• OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED
• INDEX