bound to speak truly.

Goading as have been the cruelties to which I have been
subjected--bitter as have been the trials through which I have
passed--exasperating as have been, and still are, the indignities
offered to my manhood--I find in them no excuse for the slightest
departure from truth in dealing with any branch of this subject.

First of all, I will state, as well as I can, the legal and social
relation of master and slave. A master is one--to speak in the
vocabulary of the southern states--who claims and exercises a right of
property in the person of a fellow-man. This he does with the force of
the law and the sanction of southern religion. The law gives the master
absolute power over the slave. He may work him, flog him, hire him
out, sell him, and, in certain contingencies, _kill_ him, with perfect
impunity. The slave is a human being, divested of all rights--reduced
to the level of a brute--a mere "chattel" in the eye of the law--placed
beyond the circle of human brotherhood--cut off from his kind--his
name, which the "recording angel" may have enrolled in heaven, among the
blest, is impiously inserted in a _master's ledger_, with horses, sheep,
and swine. In law, the slave has no wife, no children, no country, and
no home. He can own nothing, possess nothing, acquire nothing, but what
must belong to another. To{338} eat the fruit of his own toil, to clothe
his person with the work of his own hands, is considered stealing. He
toils that another may reap the fruit; he is industrious that another
may live in idleness; he eats unbolted meal that another may eat the
bread of fine flour; he labors in chains at home, under a burning sun
and biting lash, that another may ride in ease and splendor abroad;
he lives in ignorance that another may be educated; he is abused that
another may be exalted; he rests his toil-worn limbs on the cold, damp
ground that another may repose on the softest pillow; he is clad in
coarse and tattered raiment that another may be arrayed in purple and
fine linen; he is sheltered only by the wretched hovel that a master may
dwell in a magnificent mansion; and to this condition he is bound down
as by an arm of iron.

From this monstrous relation there springs an unceasing stream of most
revolting cruelties. The very accompaniments of the slave system
stamp it as the offspring of hell itself. To ensure good behavior, the
slaveholder relies on the whip; to induce proper humility, he relies