Page:Copley 1844 A History of Slavery and its Abolition 2nd Ed.djvu/183

Rh master and mistress did not believe this complaint, but directed the driver, if she should be ill in the morning, to bring her for medicine. The driver took her to the negro-house and again flogged her. Next morning she was taken to work in the field, where she died at noon! The master and mistress were imprisoned and fined for their cruelty: O that their spared lives may have been employed in humble penitence, and application to that precious blood which alone can deliver and cleanse from blood guiltiness!

These instances will more than suffice to show the dreadful extent of bodily suffering to which these victims of oppression were exposed when they fell into the hands of individuals of a cruel and malignant disposition. One or two samples of the yet more cruel disregard to relative ties.

The following is given in the words of a missionary who witnessed the affecting fact. "A master of slaves exercised his barbarities on a sabbath morning, while we were worshiping God in the chapel, and the cries of the female sufferers have frequently interrupted our devotions; but there was no redress for them or for us. This man wanted money; and one of the female slaves having two fine children, he sold one of them, and the child was torn from her maternal affection. In the agony of her feelings she made a hideous howling, and for that crime was flogged. Some time afterwards he sold her other child; this turned her heart within her, and impelled her into a kind of madness: she howled night and day in the yard, tore her hair, ran up and down the streets rending the heavens with her cries, and literally watering the earth with her tears. Her constant cry was, "De