rm the exception. The majority of
slaveholders find it necessary, to insure obedience, at times, to avail
themselves of the utmost extent of the law, and many go beyond it. If
kindness were the rule, we should not see advertisements filling the
columns of almost every southern newspaper, offering large rewards for
fugitive slaves, and describing them as being branded with irons,
loaded with chains, and scarred by the whip. One of the most telling
testimonies against the pretended kindness of slaveholders, is the fact
that uncounted numbers of fugitives are now inhabiting the Dismal
Swamp, preferring{344} the untamed wilderness to their cultivated
homes--choosing rather to encounter hunger and thirst, and to roam with
the wild beasts of the forest, running the hazard of being hunted and
shot down, than to submit to the authority of _kind_ masters.

I tell you, my friends, humanity is never driven to such an unnatural
course of life, without great wrong. The slave finds more of the milk of
human kindness in the bosom of the savage Indian, than in the heart
of his _Christian_ master. He leaves the man of the _bible_, and takes
refuge with the man of the _tomahawk_. He rushes from the praying
slaveholder into the paws of the bear. He quits the homes of men for
the haunts of wolves. He prefers to encounter a life of trial, however
bitter, or death, however terrible, to dragging out his existence under
the dominion of these _kind_ masters.

The apologists for slavery often speak of the abuses of slavery; and
they tell us that they are as much opposed to those abuses as we are;
and that they would go as far to correct those abuses and to ameliorate
the condition of the slave as anybody. The answer to that view is, that
slavery is itself an abuse; that it lives by abuse; and dies by the
absence of abuse. Grant that slavery is right; grant that the relations
of master and slave may innocently exist; and there is not a single
outrage which was ever committed against the slave but what finds an
apology in the very necessity of the case. As we said by a slaveholder
(the Rev. A. G. Few) to the Methodist conference, "If the relation be
right, the means to maintain it are also right;" for without those
means slavery could not exist. Remove the dreadful scourge--the plaited
thong--the galling fetter--the accursed chain--and let the slaveholder
rely solely upon moral and religious power, by which to secure obedience
to his orders, and