15 remedy. This discipline belongs to the state of Slavery. It is inherent in the relation of master and slave.”—The State v. Mann, 2 Devereaux R., 292. And this same terrible latitude has been 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, a ’d 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.”—San- ther v. Cwelt, 7 Grattan, 673. Can Barbarism further go ? Here is an irresponsible power, rendered more irresponsible still by the seclusion of the plantation, and absolutely fortified by the supplementary law excluding the testimony of slaves. That under its shelter enormities should occur, stranger than fiction, too terrible for imagination, and surpassing any individual experience, is simply according to the course of nature and the course of history. 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 said to have been taken from a single fish-pond near a nunnery, to the dismay of Pope Gregory. Under the law of Slavery, infants the offspring of masters “ who dream of Freedom in a slave’s embrace,” are pot thrown into a fish-pond, but something worse is done. They are sold. But this is only a single glimpse. Slavery, in its recesses, is another Bastile, whose horrors will never be known until it all is razed to the ground; it is the dismal castle of Giant Despair, which, when captured by the Pilgrims, excited their wonder, as they saw tl 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 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 gross n ess, 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 “ vi- gintial ” 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 bloodhound as his brutal symbol, who pursues slaves, as the hunter pursues game, and does not hes- tate in the public prints to advertise his Bar-* barism thus: “ BLOOD-HOUNDS.—I have TWO of the FINEST DOGS for CATCHING NEGROES in the Southwest. They can take the trail TWELVE HOURS after the NEGRO HAS PASSED, and catch him with ease. I live four miles southwest of Bolivar, on the road leading from Bolivar to Whitesville. I am ready at all times to catch runaway negroes DAVID TURNER. “ March 2. 1853.”—West Tennessee Democrat. The blood-hound was known in early Scottish history; it was once vindictively put upon the trail of Robert Bruce, and in barbarous days, by a cruel license of war, it was directed against the marauders of the Scottish border; but more than a century has passed since the last survivor of the race, kept as a curiosity, was fed on meal in Ettrick Forest.* The bloodhound was employed by Spain, against the natives of this continent, and the eloquence of Chatham never touched a truer chord than when, gathering force from the condemnation of this brutality, he poured his thunder upon the kindred brutality of the scalping-knife, adopted as an instrument of war by a nation professing civilization. Tardily introduced into our Republic, some time after the Missouri Compromise, when Slavery became a political passion and Slave-masters began to throw aside all disguise, the blood-hound has become the representative of our Barbarism in one of its worst forms, when engaged in the pursuit of a fellowman who is asserting his inborn title to himself; * Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel—Notes, Canto V.
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