,
39 corded horrors of Slavery seem to be the escape of
its
victims, they are
still
infinite,
and each day, by
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 Tho-
mas 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
intro-
ducing 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 Slavey, in whom its essential brutality, vulgarity, and grossness, are all embodied.
There
is
the Slave-overseer, with his bloody lash, fitly described,
of Patrick Henry,
by Mr. Wirt, who, born
Virginia,
in his
life
knew
the class, as "last and lowest, most abject, degraded, un-
in.
and his hands wield at will the irresponsible power. There is the Slave-breeder, who assuiries a higher character, and even enters legislative halls, where, in unconscious insensibilit}', 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 principled,"
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 " BLOOD-HOUNDS.—I have TWO of the FINEST DOGS for CATCHIXG NEGROES in the South-west. They can take the trail TWELVE HOURS after the
NEGRO HAS PASSED,
and catch him with
ease.
I live four miles
south-west of
