hat can believe such things, and
the rage and imprecations against those who give them currency. We
know, too, the threadbare sophistries by which slaveholders and their
apologists seek to evade such testimony. If they admit that such deeds
are committed, they tell us that they are exceedingly rare, and
therefore furnish no grounds for judging of the general treatment of
slaves; that occasionally a brutal wretch in the _free_ states
barbarously butchers his wife, but that no one thinks of inferring
from that, the general treatment of wives at the North and West.

They tell us, also, that the slaveholders of the South are
proverbially hospitable, kind, and generous, and it is incredible that
they can perpetrate such enormities upon human beings; further, that
it is absurd to suppose that they would thus injure their own
property, that self-interest would prompt them to treat their slaves
with kindness, as none but fools and madmen wantonly destroy their own
property; further, that Northern visitors at the South come back
testifying to the kind treatment of the slaves, and that the slaves
themselves corroborate such representations. All these pleas, and
scores of others, are bruited in every corner of the free States; and
who that hath eyes to see, has not sickened at the blindness that saw
not, at the palsy of heart that felt not, or at the cowardice and
sycophancy that dared not expose such shallow fallacies. We are not to
be turned from our purpose by such vapid babblings. In their
appropriate places, we propose to consider these objections and
various others, and to show their emptiness and folly.

The foregoing declarations touching the inflictions upon slaves, are
not hap-hazard assertions, nor the exaggerations of fiction conjured
up to carry a point; nor are they the rhapsodies of enthusiasm, nor
crude conclusions, jumped at by hasty and imperfect investigation, nor
the aimless outpourings either of sympathy or poetry; but they are
proclamations of deliberate, well-weighed convictions, produced by
accumulations of proof, by affirmations and affidavits, by written
testimonies and statements of a cloud of witnesses who speak what they
know and testify what they have seen, and all these impregnably
fortified by proofs innumerable, in the relation of the slaveholder to
his slave, the nature of arbitrary power, and the nature and history
of man.

Of the witnesses whose testimony is embodied in the following pages, a