and indecent outrages
upon humanity as that I have described; when they sanction a villain
in thus marching half naked women and men, loaded with chains, without
being charged with any crime but that of being _black_ from one
section of the United States to another, hundreds of miles in the face
of day, they disgrace themselves, and the country to which they
belong."[10]

[Footnote 10: The fact that Mr. Paulding, in the reprint of these
"Letters," in 1835, struck out this passage with all others
disparaging to slavery and its supporters, does not impair the force
of his testimony, however much it may sink the man. Nor will the next
generation regard with any more reverence, his character as a prophet,
because in the edition of 1835, two years after the American
Antislavery Society was formed, and when its auxiliaries were numbered
by hundreds, he inserted a _prediction_ that such movements would be
made at the North, with most disastrous results. "Wot ye not that such
a man as I can certainly divine!" Mr. Paulding has already been taught
by Judge Jay, that he who aspires to the fame of an oracle, without
its inspiration, must resort to other expedients to prevent detection,
than the clumsy one of _antedating_ his responses.]

III. BRANDINGS, MAIMINGS, GUY-SHOT WOUNDS, &c.

The slaves are often branded with hot irons, pursued with fire arms
and _shot_, hunted with dogs and torn by them, shockingly maimed with
knives, dirks, &c.; have their ears cut off, their eyes knocked out,
their bones dislocated and broken with bludgeons, their fingers and
toes cut off, their faces and other parts of their persons disfigured
with scars and gashes, _besides_ those made with the lash.

We shall adopt, under this head, the same course as that pursued under
previous ones,--first give the testimony of the slaveholders
themselves, to the mutilations, &c. by copying their own graphic
descriptions of them, in advertisements published under their own
names, and in newspapers published in the slave states, and,
generally, in their own immediate vicinity. We shall, as heretofore,
insert only so much of each advertisement as will be necessary to make
the point intelligible.

Mr. Micajah Ricks, Nash County, North Carolina, in the Raleigh
"Standard," July 18, 1838.

"Ranaway, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went
off, _I burnt her with a hot iron_, on the left side of her face,_ I
tried to make the letter M._"