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 charitably 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, Centerville, Allegany county, New York, who has resided four years in the midst of southern slavery—