Page:The Barbarism of Slavery - Sumner - 1863.pdf/45

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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