that
she believed she had done right to have it inflicted upon her. The
last 'owner' of the poor old slave, said she, had no fault to find
with her as a servant.

I remember very well that when I was a child, our next door neighbor
whipped a young woman so brutally, that in order to escape his blows
she rushed through the drawing-room window in the second story, and
fell upon the street pavement below and broke her hip. This
circumstance produced no excitement or inquiry.

The following circumstance occurred in Charleston, in 1828:

A slaveholder, after flogging a little girl about thirteen years old,
set her on a table with her feet fastened in a pair of stocks. He then
locked the door and took out the key. When the door was opened she
was found dead, having fallen from the table. When I asked a
prominent lawyer, who belonged to one of the first families in the
State, whether the murderer of this helpless child could not be
indicted, he coolly replied, that the slave was Mr. ----'s property,
and if he chose to suffer the _loss_, no one else had any thing to do
with it. The loss of _human life_, the distress of the parents and
other relatives of the little girl, seemed utterly out of his
thoughts: it was the loss of _property_ only that presented itself to
his mind.

I knew a gentleman of great benevolence and generosity of character,
so essentially to injure the eye of a little boy, about ten years old,
as to destroy its sight, by the blow of a cowhide, inflicted whilst he
was whipping him.[7] I have heard the same individual speak of
"breaking down the spirit of a slave under the lash" as perfectly
right.

[Footnote 7: The Jewish law would have set this servant free, for his
eye's sake, but he was held in slavery and sold from hand to hand,
although, besides this title to his liberty according to Jewish law,
he was a _mulatto_, and therefore free under the Constitution of the
United States, in whose preamble our fathers declare that they
established it expressly to "secure the blessings of _liberty_ to
themselves and _their posterity_."--Ed.]

I also know that an aged slave of his, (by marriage,) was allowed to
get a scanty and precarious subsistence, by begging in the streets of
Charleston--he was too old to work, and therefore _his allowance was
stopped_, and he was turned out to make his living by begging.

When I was about thirteen years old, I attended a seminary, in
Charleston, which was superintended