entitled 'Letters from the
South, written during an excursion in the summer of 1816.' In the
first volume of that work, page 128, Mr. P. gives the following
description:

"The sun was shining out very hot--and in turning the angle of the
road, we encountered the following group: first, a little cart drawn
by one horse, in which five or six half naked black children were
tumbled like pigs together. The cart had no covering, and they seemed
to have been broiled to sleep. Behind the cart marched three black
women, with head, neck and breasts uncovered, and without shoes or
stockings: next came three men, bare-headed, and _chained together
with an ox-chain_. Last of all, came a white man on horse back,
carrying his pistols in his belt, and who, as we passed him, had the
impudence to look us in the face without blushing. At a house where we
stopped a little further on, we learned that he had bought these
miserable beings in Maryland, and was marching them in this manner to
one of the more southern states. Shame on the State of Maryland! and I
say, shame on the State of Virginia! and every state through which
this wretched cavalcade was permitted to pass! I do say, that when
they (the slaveholders) permit such flagrant and indecent outrages
upon humanity as that I have described; when they sanction a villain
in thus marching half naked women and men, loaded with chains, without
being charged with any crime but that of being _black_ from one
section of the United States to another, hundreds of miles in the face
of day, they disgrace themselves, and the country to which they
belong."[10]

[Footnote 10: The fact that Mr. Paulding, in the reprint of these
"Letters," in 1835, struck out this passage with all others
disparaging to slavery and its supporters, does not impair the force
of his testimony, however much it may sink the man. Nor will the next
generation regard with any more reverence, his character as a prophet,
because in the edition of 1835, two years after the American
Antislavery Society was formed, and when its auxiliaries were numbered
by hundreds, he inserted a _prediction_ that such movements would be
made at the North, with most disastrous results. "Wot ye not that such
a man as I can certainly divine!" Mr. Paulding has already been taught
by Judge Jay, that he who aspires to the fame of an oracle, without
its inspiration, must resort to other expedients to prevent detection,
than the clumsy one of _antedatin