man closes his advertisement with the following notice:--
"To PLANTERS AND OTHERS.--Wanted _fifty negroes_. Any person having
sick negroes, considered incurable by their respective physicians, and
wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for negroes affected
with scrofula or king's evil, confirmed hypocondriasm, apoplexy,
diseases of the liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach and intestines,
bladder and its appendages, diarrhea, dysentery, &c. The highest cash
price will be paid on application as above."
The absolute barbarism of a 'public opinion' which not only tolerates,
but _produces_ such advertisements as this, was outdone by nothing in
the dark ages. If the reader has a heart of flesh, he can feel it
without help, and if he has not, comment will not create it. The total
indifference of slaveholders to such a cold blooded proposition, their
utter unconsciousness of the paralysis of heart, and death of
sympathy, and every feeling of common humanity for the slave, which it
reveals, is enough, of itself to show that the tendency of the spirit
of slaveholding is, to kill in the soul whatever it touches. It has no
eyes to see, nor ears to hear, nor mind to understand, nor heart to
feel for its victims as _human beings_. To show that the above
indication of the savage state is not an index of individual feeling,
but of 'public opinion,' it is sufficient to say, that it appears to
be a standing advertisement in the Charleston Mercury, the leading
political paper of South Carolina, the organ of the Honorables John C.
Calhoun, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Hugh S. Legare, and others regarded as
the elite of her statesmen and literati. Besides, candidates for
popular favor, like the doctor who advertises for the fifty
'incurables,' take special care to conciliate, rather than outrage,
'public opinion.' Is the doctor so ignorant of 'public opinion' in his
own city, that he has unwittingly committed violence upon it in his
advertisement? We trow not. The same 'public opinion' which gave birth
to the advertisement of doctor Stillman, and to those of the
professors in both the medical institutions, founded the Charleston
'Work House'--a soft name for a Moloch temple dedicated to torture,
and reeking with blood, in the midst of the city; to which masters and
mistresses send their slaves of both sexes to be stripped, tied up,
and cut with the lash till the blood and mangled flesh flow to their
feet, or to be beaten and bruised with
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