Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/29

Rh affections of the lungs, and from the first-named disorder." "The moral consequences are, in an equivalent degree, depressing to the mind." "It is not by remorse and anguish that he is affected so much, as by intellectual and moral weakness and decay; and gloomy confinement becomes thus, to him, mentally, as well as physically, a nearer approach to the punishment of death.

"The effect of separate imprisonment has not been, as has been erroneously charged against it, to produce insanity, although humane and strict analysis has shown many to have been affected both with insanity and with imbecility, at the times when they have committed the offences for which they are sentenced.

"The effect upon the unfortunate colored prisoners, though scarcely perceptible upon the whites, has been to produce not mania, but weakness of mind; dementia, instead of deranged excitement."

Now, my brother, who ever heard of a prison being built on one of our southern plantations? When the slave commits a crime, his master switches him, with the same impulse that he switches his own child. The slave does not hate him for thus punishing him, any more than his child does; and an hour afterwards he is as merry, perhaps, as if no chastisement had been inflicted on him. Is not such punishment much more merciful, much more suited to the negro mind, than to shut him up in a prison for months in the Northern cities, where confinement is known to have the above-named lamentable effects? They say here, that we sell our slaves. This is sometimes true; but we sell them to a master whose self-interest is just as much concerned as our own, to treat him kindly. It is a base falsehood that is fulminated against us, that we separate a mother from her little children, when we sell them. And it is equally false, that the master locks up all of his slaves every night, and arms himself with swords and guns, to protect himself, for fear of their nocturnal treacherous designs. So far from it, the master regards his slaves the best friends he has on earth. These and numerous other absurdities are believed by the abolitionists. I have introduced the remarks of Dr. Coates, to let you see what are the real opinions of thinking men and physicians at the North, about the developments, physical and mental, of the black race, and then to express my unfeigned astonishment that, with such facts staring them in the face, any persons could be found so malignant and fanatical as to inveigle the colored people from their happy home, in the warm sunny South, to come to the North to gain suicidal freedom.

Even the runaway slaves whom the abolitionists have smuggled into