now practised to a considerable extent! The correctness of this
statement was substantially admitted by the slaveholders then on
board."

The late MR. SAMUEL BLACKWELL, a highly respected citizen of Jersey
city, opposite the city of New York, and a member of the Presbyterian
church, visited many of the sugar plantations in Louisiana a few years
since: and having for many years been the owner of an extensive sugar
refinery in England, and subsequently in this country, he had not only
every facility afforded him by the planters, for personal inspection
of all parts of the process of sugar-making, but received from them
the most unreserved communications, as to their management of their
slaves. Mr. B., after his return, frequently made the following
statement to gentlemen of his acquaintance,--"That the planters
generally declared to him, that they were _obliged_ so to over-work
their slaves during the sugar-making season, (from eight to ten
weeks,) as to use _them up_ in seven or eight years. For, said they,
after the process is commenced, it must be pushed without cessation,
night and day; and we cannot afford to keep a sufficient number of
slaves to do the _extra_ work at the time of sugar-making, as we could
not profitably employ them the rest of the year."

It is not only true of the sugar planters, but of the slaveholders
generally throughout the far south and south west, that they believe
it for their interest to wear out the slaves by excessive toil in
eight or ten years after they put them into the field.[4]

[Footnote 4: Alexander Jones. Esq., a large planter in West Feliciana,
Louisiana, published a communication in the "North Carolina True
American," Nov. 25, 1838, in which, speaking of the horses employed in
the mills on the plantations for ginning cotton, he says, they "are
much whipped and jaded;" and adds, "In fact, this service is so severe
on horses, as to shorten their lives in many instances, if not
actually kill them in gear."

Those who work one kind of their "live stock" so as to "shorten their
lives," or "kill them in gear" would not stick at doing the same thing
to another kind.]

REV. DOCTOR REED, of London, who went through Kentucky, Virginia and
Maryland in the summer of 1834, gives the following testimony:

"I was told confidently and from _excellent authority_, that recently
at a meeting of planters in South Carolina, the question was seriously
discussed whether the slave is more pr