3. That the slaves must suffer frequent and terrible inflictions, follows inevitably from the character of those who direct their labor. Whatever may be the character of the slaveholders themselves, all agree that the overseers are, as a class, most abandoned, brutal, and desperate men. This is so well known and believed that any testimony to prove it seems needless. The testimony of Mr. WIRT, late Attorney General of the United States, a Virginian and a slaveholder, is as follows. In his life of Patrick Henry, p. 36, speaking of the different classes of society in Virginia, he says,—"Last and lowest a feculum, of beings called 'overseers'—the most abject, degraded, unprincipled race, always cap in hand to the dons who employ them, and furnishing materials for the exercise of their pride, insolence, and spirit of domination."
Rev. PHINEAS SMITH, of Centreville, New-York, who has resided some years at the south, says of overseers—
"It need hardly be added that overseers are in general ignorant, unprincipled and cruel, and in such low repute that they are not permitted to come to the tables of their employers; yet they have the constant control of all the human cattle that belong to the master.
"These men are continually advancing from their low station to the higher one of masters. These changes bring into the possession of power a class of men of whose mental and moral qualities I have already spoken."
Rev. HORACE MOULTON, Marlboro', Massachusetts, who lived in Georgia several years, says of them,—
"The overseers are generally loose in their morals; it is the object of masters to employ those whom they think will get the most work out of their hands,—hence those who whip and torment the slaves the most are in many instances called the best overseers. The masters think those whom the slaves fear the most are the best. Quite a portion of the masters employ their own slaves as overseers, or rather they are called drivers; these are more subject to the will of the masters than the white overseers are; some of them are as lordly as an Austrian prince, and sometimes more cruel even than the whites."
That the overseers are, as a body, sensual, brutal, and violent men is proverbial. The tender mercies of such men must be cruel.
4. The ownership of human beings necessarily presupposes an utter disregard of their happiness. He who assumes it monopolizes their whole capital, leaves them no stock on which to trade, and out of which to make happiness. Whatever is the master's gain is the slave's loss, a loss wrested from him by the master, for the express purpose of making it his own gain; this is the master's constant employment—forcing the slave to toil—violently wringing from him all he has and all he gets, and using it as his own;—like the vile bird that never builds its nest from materials of its own gathering, but either drives other birds from theirs and takes possession of them, or tears them in pieces to get the means of constructing their own. This daily practice of forcibly robbing others, and habitually living on the plunder, cannot but beget in the mind the habit of regarding the interests and happiness of those whom it robs, as of no sort of consequence in comparison with its own; consequently whenever those interests and this happiness are in the way of its own gratification, they will be sacrificed without scruple. He who cannot see this would be unable to feel it, if it were seen.