39
corded horrors of Slavery seem to be 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 the examples of history and the lessons of political wisdom are alike delusive, its unrecorded horrors must assume a form of yet more fearful dimensions, as we try to contemplate them. 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.
If this picture of the relations of Slave-masters with their slaves could receive any further darkness, it would be by introducing the figures of the congenial agents through which the Barbarism is maintained; the Slave-overseer, the Slave-breeder, and the Slave-hunter, each without a peer except in his brother, and the whole constituting the triumvirate of Slavery, in whom its essential brutality, vulgarity, and grossness, are all embodied. There is the Slave-overseer, with his bloody lash, fitly described, in his life of Patrick Henry, by Mr. Wirt, who, born in Virginia, knew the class, as “last and lowest, most abject, degraded, unprincipled," and his hands wield at will the irresponsible power. There is the Slave-breeder, who assumes a higher character, and even enters legislative halls, where, in unconscious insensibility, he shocks civilization by denying, like Mr. Gholson, of Virginia, any alleged distinction between the “female slave" and “the brood mare," by openly asserting the necessary respite from work during the gestation of the female slave as the ground of property in her offspring, and by proclaiming that in this “vigintial" crop of human flesh consists much of the wealth of his State, while another Virginian, not yet hardened to this debasing trade, whose annual sacrifice reaches 25,000 human souls, confesses the indignation and shame with which he beholds his State “converted into one grand menagerie, where men are reared for the market, like oxen for the shambles." And lastly there is the Slave-hunter, with the blood-hound as his brutal symbol, who pursues slaves, as the hunter pursues game, and does not hesitate in the public prints to advertise his Barbarism thus:
