March 28, 1843, in a public address at Cincinnati, the Rev. Edward Smith, True Wesleyan, of Pittsburgh, stated that he had lived in slave states thirty-two years; and, speaking of a certain D. D. of his acquaintance, he adds:—“He was a slaveholder, and a severe one, too, and often, with his own hands, he applied the cowhide to the naked backs of his slaves. On one occasion, a woman that served in the house, committed, on Sabbath morning, an offence of too great magnitude to go unpunished until Monday morning. The Dr. took his woman into the cellar, and as is usual in such cases, stripped her from her waist up, and then applied the lash. The woman writhed and winced under each stroke, and cried, 'Oh Lord! Oh Lord!! OH LORD!!!’ The Doctor stopped, and his hands fell to his side as though struck with palsy, gazed on the woman with astonishment, and thus addressed her, (the congregation must pardon me for repeating his words), 'Hush, you b—h, will you take the name of the Lord in vain on the Sabbath day?’ When he had stopped the woman from the gross profanity of crying to God on the Sabbath day, he finished whipping her, and then went and essayed to preach that gospel to his congregation, which proclaims liberty to the captive and the opening of the prison doors to them who are bound.”
The Greatest Impediment.
“We are about to make an announcement,” says the True American, “which must sound very strange to those whose field of observation is unlike our own: The greatest impediment to the success of the Anti-Slavery movement in the slave States is, the opposition to it of those men who profess to have been commissioned by high Heaven to go abroad and use their efforts for the mitigation of human misery and the extirpation of human wrong! This assertion, which appears so monstrous, will not surprise any one who lives among slaveholders. Our conviction of its truth has been confirmed by extensive observation.”
RELIGIOUS TESTIMONIES.
Archbishop Potter. Some of our wise ones will have it that doulos means slave. Archbishop Potter, than whom no man was more learned in Grecian antiquities, in his work on them, published years ago, says, chap. 10, “Slaves, as long as they were under the government of a master, were called oiketdi; but after their freedom was granted them, they were douloi, not being like the former, a part of their master’s estate, but only obliged to some grateful acknowledgments and small services, such as were required of the Metoikoi, to whom they were in some few things inferior.”
The Younger Edwards, (Pastor of a church in New Haven, and afterwards President of Union College)—“Every man who cannot show, that his negro hath by his voluntary conduct, forfeited his liberty, is obligated immediately to manumit him. And to hold [such an one] in a state of slavery, is to be every day guilty of robbing him of his liberty, or of man-stealing—and fifty years from this time (1791) it will be as shameful for a man to hold a negro slave, as to be guilty of common robbery or theft.”
Dr. Adam Clarke. “Among Christians slavery is an enormity, and a crime for which perdition has scarcely an adequate state of punishment.”