The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

"I stayed in New Orleans three weeks: during that time there used to pass by where I stayed a number of slaves, each with an iron band around his ankle, a chain attached to it, and an eighteen pound ball at the end. They were employed in wheeling dirt with a wheelbarrow; they would put the ball into the barrow when they moved.—I recollect one day, that I counted nineteen of them, sometimes there were not as many; they were driven by a slave, with a long lash, as if they were beasts. These, I learned, were runaway slaves from the plantations above New Orleans.

"There was also a negro woman, that used daily to come to the market with milk; she had an iron band around her neck, with three rods projecting from it, about sixteen inches long, crooked at the ends."

For the fact which follows we are indebted to Mr. SAMUEL HALL, a teacher in Marietta College, Ohio. We quote his letter.

"Mr. Curtis, a journeyman cabinet-maker, of Marietta, relates the following, of which he was an eye witness. Mr. Curtis is every way worthy of credit.

"In September, 1837, at 'Milligan's Bend,' in the Mississippi river, I saw a negro with an iron band around his head, locked behind with a padlock. In the front, where it passed the mouth, there was a projection inward of an inch and a half, which entered the mouth.

"The overseer told me, he was so addicted to running away, it did not do any good to whip him for it. He said he kept this gag constantly on him, and intended to do so as long as he was on the plantation: so that, if he ran away, he could not eat, and would starve to death. The slave asked for drink in my presence; and the overseer made him lie down on his back, and turned water on his face two or three feet high, in order to torment him, as he could not swallow a drop.—The slave then asked permission to go to the river; which being granted, he thrust his face and head entirely under the water, that being the only way he could drink with his gag on. The gag was taken off when he took his food, and then replaced afterwards."

EXTRACT OF A LETTER FROM MRS. SOPHIA LITTLE, of Newport, Rhode Island, daughter of Hon. Asher Robbins, senator in Congress for that state.

"There was lately found, in the hold of a vessel engaged in the southern trade, by a person who was clearing it out, an iron collar, with three horns projecting from it. It seems that a young female slave, on whose slender neck was riveted this fiendish instrument of torture, ran away from her tyrant, and begged the captain to bring her off with him. This the captain refused to do; but unriveted the collar from her neck, and threw it away in the hold of the vessel. The collar is now at the anti-slavery office, Providence. To the truth of these facts Mr. William H. Reed, a gentleman of the highest moral character, is ready to vouch.

"Mr. Reed is in possession of many facts of cruelty witnessed by persons of veracity; but these witnesses are not willing to give their names. One case in particular he mentioned. Speaking with a certain captain, of the state of the slaves at the south, the captain contended that their punishments were often very lenient; and, as an instance of their excellent clemency, mentioned, that in one instance, not wishing to whip a slave, they sent him to a blacksmith, and had an iron band fastened around him, with three long projections reaching above his head; and this he wore some time."

EXTRACT OF A LETTER FROM MR. JONATHON F. BALDWIN, of Lorain county, Ohio. Mr. B. was formerly a merchant in Massillon, Ohio, and an elder in the Presbyterian Church there.

"Dear Brother,—In conversation with Judge Lyman, of Litchfield county, Connecticut, last June, he stated to me, that several years since he was in Columbia, South Carolina, and observing a colored man lying on the floor of a blacksmith's shop, as he was passing it, his curiosity led him in. He learned the man was a slave and rather unmanageable. Several men were attempting to detach from his ankle an iron which had been bent around it.

"The iron was a piece of a flat bar of the ordinary size from the forge hammer, and bent around the ankle, the ends meeting, and forming a hoop of about the diameter of the leg. There was one or more strings attached to the iron and extending up around his neck, evidently so to suspend it as to prevent its galling by its weight when at work, yet it had galled or griped till the leg had swollen out beyond the iron and inflamed and suppurated, so that the leg for a considerable distance above and below the iron, was a mass of putrefaction, the most loathsome of any wound he had ever witnessed on any living creature. The slave lay on his back on the floor, with his leg on an anvil which sat also on the floor, one man had a chisel used for splitting iron, and another struck it with a sledge, to drive it between the ends of the hoop and separate it so that it might be taken off. Mr. Lyman said that the man swung the sledge over his shoulders as if splitting iron, and struck many blows before he succeeded in parting the ends of the iron at all, the bar was so large and stubborn—at length they spread it as far as they could without driving the chisel so low as to ruin the leg. The slave, a man of twenty-five years, perhaps, whose countenance was the index of a mind ill adapted to the degradations of slavery, never uttered a word or a groan in all the process, but the copious flow of sweat from every pore, the dreadful contractions and distortions of every muscle in his body, showed clearly the great amount of his sufferings; and all this while, such was the diseased state of the limb, that at every blow, the bloody, corrupted matter gushed out in all directions several feet, in such profusion as literally to cover a large area around the anvil. After various other fruitless attempts to spread the iron, they concluded it was necessary to weaken by filing before it could be got off which he left them attempting to do."

Mr. WILLIAM DROWN, a well known citizen of Rhode Island, formerly of Providence, who has traveled in nearly all the slave states, thus testifies in a recent letter:

"I recollect seeing large gangs of slaves, generally a considerable number in each gang, being chained, passing westward over the mountains from Maryland, Virginia, &c. to the Ohio. On that river I have frequently seen flat boats loaded with them, and their keepers armed with pistols and dirks to guard them.