“‘I can tell you how you can break a nigger of running away, certain,’ said the Slave-Master. ‘There was an old fellow I used to know in Georgia, that always cured his so. If a nigger ran away, when he caught him, he would bind his knee over a log, and fasten him so he couldn’t stir; then he’d take a pair of pincers, and pull one of his toe-nails out by the roots, and tell him, that, if he ever run away again, he would pull out two of them, and if he run away again after that, he told him he’d pull out four of them, and so on, doubling each time. He never had to do it more than twice; it always cured them.’”[64]
Like this story, from the lips of a Slave-Master, is another, where the master, angry because his slave sought to regain his God-given liberty, deliberately cut the tendons of his heel, thus horribly maiming him for life.
In vain these instances are denied. Their accumulating number, authenticated in every possible manner, by the press, by a cloud of witnesses, and by the confession of Slave-Masters, stares us constantly in the face.
Here we are brought again to the Slave Code, under the shelter of which these things, and worse, are done with complete impunity. Listen to the remarkable words of Mr. Justice Ruffin, of North Carolina, who, in a solemn decision, thus portrays, affirms, and deplores this terrible latitude. The obedience of the slave, he says,—
“is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body.… The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect. I most freely confess my sense of the harshness of this proposition. I feel it as deeply as any man can. And, as a principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But in the actual condition of things it must be so. There is no remedy. This discipline belongs to the state of Slavery.… It is inherent in the relation of master and slave.”[65]
This same license is thus expounded in a recent judicial decision of Virginia:—
“It is the policy of the law in respect to the relation of master and slave, and for the sake of securing proper subordination and obedience on the part of the slave, to protect the master from prosecution, even if the whipping and punishment be malicious, cruel, and excessive.”[66]
Can Barbarism further go? Here is irresponsible power, rendered more irresponsible still by the seclusion of the plantation, and absolutely fortified by supplementary law excluding the testimony of slaves. That under its shelter enormities should occur, stranger than fiction, too terrible for imagination, and surpassing any attested experience, is simply according to the course of Nature and the course of history. Antiquity has illustrations which are most painful. From Ovid we learn how the porter was chained at his master’s gate;[67] by Plautus we are introduced to the various instruments of punishment, in fearful catalogue;[68] and in the pages of the philosopher Seneca we are saddened by the cruelties of which the slave was victim.[69] A later writer, the great teacher of medicine, Galen, describes men knocking out the teeth of slaves with the fist, falling upon them not only with fist, but with the heels, and gouging the eyes with a pen, if at hand, as did the Emperor Adrian on one occasion;[70] while Tacitus shows how four hundred slaves in the house of an assassinated master were handed over to vindictive death.[71] St. Chrysostom portrays a mistress dragging a slave-girl by the hair, and herself applying the whip, until the cries of her bruised victim filled the whole house and penetrated the street.[72]
All this is ancient Barbarism, according to the evidence; but the analogies of life show that such things must be, where Slavery prevails. The visitation of the abbeys in England disclosed vice and disorder in startling forms, cloaked by the irresponsible privacy of monastic life. A similar visitation of plantations would disclose more fearful results, cloaked by the irresponsible privacy of Slavery. Every Slave-Master on his plantation is a Bashaw, with all the prerogatives of a Turk. According to Hobbes, he is a “petty king.” This is true; and every plantation is of itself a petty kingdom, with more than the immunities of an abbey. Six thousand skulls of infants are reported to have been taken from a single fish-pond near a nunnery, to the dismay of Pope Gregory.[73] Under the Law of Slavery, infants, the offspring of masters “who dream of Freedom in a slave’s embrace,” are not thrown into a fish-pond, but something worse is done. They are sold. This is a single glimpse only. Slavery, in its recesses, is another Bastile, whose horrors will never be known until it shall be razed to the ground; it is the dismal castle of Giant Despair, which, when captured by the Pilgrims, excited their wonder, as they saw “the dead bodies that lay here and there in the castle-yard, and how full of dead men’s bones the dungeon was.” The recorded horrors of Slavery are infinite, and each day, by the escape of its victims, they are still further attested, while the door of the vast prison-house is left ajar. But, alas! unless examples of history and lessons of political wisdom are alike delusive, its unrecorded horrors must assume a form of more fearful dimensions. Baffling all attempts at description, they sink into that chapter of Sir Thomas Browne entitled “Of some Relations whose Truth we fear,” and among kindred things whereof, according to this eloquent philosopher, “there remains no register but that of Hell.”