"This system licenses and produces great cruelty.
"Mangling, imprisonment, starvation, every species of torture, may be inflicted upon him, (the slave,) and he has no redress.
"There are now in our whole land two millions of human beings, exposed, defenceless, to every insult, and every injury short of maiming or death, which their fellow men may choose to inflict. They suffer all that can be inflicted by wanton caprice, by grasping avarice, by brutal lust, by malignant spite, and by insane anger. Their happiness is the sport of every whim, and the prey of every passion that may, occasionally, or habitually, infest the master's bosom. If we could calculate the amount of wo endured by ill-treated slaves, it would overwhelm every compassionate heart—it would move even the obdurate to sympathy. There is also a vast sum of suffering inflicted upon the slave by humane masters, as a punishment for that idleness and misconduct which slavery naturally produces.
"Brutal stripes and all the varied kinds of personal indignities, are not the only species of cruelty which slavery licenses."
TESTIMONY OF THE REV. N.H. HARDING, Pastor of the Presbyterian Church, in Oxford, North Carolina, a slaveholder.
"I am greatly surprised that you should in any form have been the apologist of a system so full of deadly poison to all holiness and benevolence as slavery, the concocted essence of fraud, selfishness, and cold hearted tyranny, and the fruitful parent of unnumbered evils, both to the oppressor and the oppressed, THE ONE THOUSANDTH PART OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN BROUGHT TO LIGHT."
MR. ASA A. STONE, a theological student, who lived near Natchez, (Mi.,) in 1834 and 5, sent the following with other testimony, to be published under his own name, in the N.Y. Evangelist, while he was still residing there.
"Floggings for all offences, including deficiencies in work, are frightfully common, and most terribly severe.
"Rubbing with salt and red pepper is very common after a severe whipping."
TESTIMONY OF REV. PHINEAS SMITH, Centreville, Allegany Co., N.Y. who lived four years at the South.