ch I have been familiar; but this may not, cannot
be; they come over my memory like gory spectres, and implore me with
resistless power, in the name of a God of mercy, in the name of a
crucified Savior, in the name of humanity; for the sake of the
slaveholder, as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors of
the southern prison house. I feel impelled by a sacred sense of duty,
by my obligations to my country, by sympathy for the bleeding victims
of tyranny and lust, to give my testimony respecting the system of
American slavery,--to detail a few facts, most of which came under my
_personal observation_. And here I may premise, that the actors in
these tragedies were all men and women of the highest respectability,
and of the first families in South Carolina, and, with one exception,
citizens of Charleston; and that their cruelties did not in the
slightest degree affect their standing in society.

A handsome mulatto woman, about 18 or 20 years of age, whose
independent spirit could not brook the degradation of slavery, was in
the habit of running away: for this offence she had been repeatedly
sent by her master and mistress to be whipped by the keeper of the
Charleston work-house. This had been done with such inhuman severity,
as to lacerate her back in a most shocking manner; a finger could not
be laid between the cuts. But the love of liberty was too strong to be
annihilated by torture; and, as a last resort, she was whipped at
several different times, and kept a close prisoner. A heavy iron
collar, with three long prongs projecting from it, was placed round
her neck, and a strong and sound front tooth was extracted, to serve
as a mark to describe her, in case of escape. Her sufferings at this
time were agonizing; she could lie in no position but on her back,
which was sore from scourgings, as I can testify, from personal
inspection, and her only place of rest was the floor, on a blanket.
These outrages were committed in a family where the mistress daily
read the scriptures, and assembled her children for family worship.
She was accounted, and was really, so far as almsgiving was concerned,
a charitable woman, and tender hearted to the poor; and yet this
suffering slave, who was the seamstress of the family, was continually
in her presence, sitting in her chamber to sew, or engaged in her
other household work, with her lacerated and bleeding back, her
mutilated mouth, and heavy iron collar, without, so far as ap