vertising themselves as blood-hound trainers, and offering to
hunt down slaves at fifteen dollars a piece, recommending their
hounds as the fleetest in the neighborhood, never known to fail.{320}
Advertisements are from time to time inserted, stating that slaves have
escaped with iron collars about their necks, with bands of iron about
their feet, marked with the lash, branded with red-hot irons, the
initials of their master's name burned into their flesh; and the masters
advertise the fact of their being thus branded with their own signature,
thereby proving to the world, that, however damning it may appear to
non-slavers, such practices are not regarded discreditable among the
slaveholders themselves. Why, I believe if a man should brand his horse
in this country--burn the initials of his name into any of his cattle,
and publish the ferocious deed here--that the united execrations of
Christians in Britain would descend upon him. Yet in the United States,
human beings are thus branded. As Whittier says--

... _Our countrymen in chains,
The whip on woman's shrinking flesh,
Our soil yet reddening with the stains
Caught from her scourgings warm and fresh_.

The slave-dealer boldly publishes his infamous acts to the world. Of all
things that have been said of slavery to which exception has been taken
by slaveholders, this, the charge of cruelty, stands foremost, and yet
there is no charge capable of clearer demonstration, than that of the
most barbarous inhumanity on the part of the slaveholders toward their
slaves. And all this is necessary; it is necessary to resort to these
cruelties, in order to _make the slave a slave_, and to _keep him a
slave_. Why, my experience all goes to prove the truth of what you will
call a marvelous proposition, that the better you treat a slave, the
more you destroy his value _as a slave_, and enhance the probability of
his eluding the grasp of the slaveholder; the more kindly you treat him,
the more wretched you make him, while you keep him in the condition of
a slave. My experience, I say, confirms the truth of this proposition.
When I was treated exceedingly ill; when my back was being scourged
daily; when I was whipped within an inch of my life--_life_ was all I
cared for. "Spare my life," was my continual prayer. When I was looking
for the blow about to be inflicted upon my head, I was not thinking
of my liberty; it was my life. But, as