ssouri, and not through those states generally.
"Whilst at St. Louis, a number of years ago, as he was going to work
with Mr. Henry Males, and another carpenter, they heard groans from a
barn by the road-side: they stopped, and looking through the cracks of
the barn, saw a negro bound hand and foot to a post, so that his toes
just touched the ground; and his master, Captain Thorpe, was
inflicting punishment; he had whipped him till exhausted,--rested
himself, and returned again to the punishment. The wretched sufferer
was in a most pitiable condition, and the warm blood and dry dust of
the barn had formed a mortar up to his instep. Mr. Males jumped the
fence, and remonstrated so effectually with Capt. Thorpe, that he
ceased the punishment. It was six weeks before that slave could put on
his shirt!
"John Mackey, a rich slaveholder, lived near Clarksville, Pike co.,
Missouri, some years since. He whipped his slave Billy, a boy fourteen
years old, till he was sick and stupid; he then sent him home. Then,
for his stupidity, whipped him again, and fractured his skull with an
axe-helve. He buried him away in the woods; dark words were whispered,
and the body was disinterred. A coroner's inquest was held, and Mr. R.
Anderson, the coroner, brought in a verdict of death from fractured
skull, occasioned by blows from an axe-handle, inflicted by John
Mackey. The case was brought into court, but Mackey was rich, and his
murdered victim was his SLAVE; after expending about $500 be walked
free.
"One Mrs. Mann, living near ----, in ---- co., Missouri was known to
be very cruel to her slaves. She had a bench made purposely to whip
them upon; and what she called her "six pound paddle," an instrument
of prodigious torture, bored through with holes; this she would wield
with both hands as she stood over her prostrate victim.
"She thus punished a hired slave woman named Fanny, belonging to Mr.
Charles Trabue, who lives neat Palmyra, Marion co., Missouri; on the
morning after the punishment Fanny was a corpse; she was silently and
quickly buried, but rumor was not so easily stopped. Mr. Trabue heard
of it, and commenced suit for his _property_. The murdered slave was
disinterred, and an inquest held; her back was a mass of jellied
muscle; and the coroner brought in a verdict of death by the 'six
pound paddle.' Mrs. Mann fled for a few months, but returned again,
and her friends found means to protract the suit.
"This same Mrs. M
|