iver, one of the most unhealthy districts in the low country of South
Carolina; further, that large numbers of his slaves worked in the
_rice marshes_, or 'swamps' as they are called in that state--and that
during six months of the year, so fatal to health is the malaria of
the swamps in that region that the planters and their families
invariably abandon their plantations, regarding it as downright
presumption to spend a single day upon them 'between the frosts' of
the early spring and the last of November.
The reader may infer the high standing of Mr. Heyward in South
Carolina, from the fact that he was selected with four other
freeholders to constitute a Court for the trial of the conspirators in
the insurrection plot at Charleston, in 1822. Another of the
individuals chosen to constitute that court was Colonel Henry Deas,
now president of the Board of Trustees of Charleston College, and a
few years since a member of the Senate of South Carolina. From a late
correspondence in the "Greenvile (S.C.) Mountaineer," between Rev.
William M. Wightman, a professor in Randolph, Macon, College, and a
number of the citizens of Lodi, South Carolina, it appears that the
cruelty of this Colonel Deas to his slaves, is proverbial in South
Carolina, so much that Professor Wightman, in the sermon which
occasioned the correspondence, spoke of the Colonel's inhumanity to
his slaves as a matter of perfect notoriety.
Another South Carolina slaveholder, Hon. Whitmarsh B. Seabrook,
recently, we believe, Lieut. Governor of the state, gives the
following testimony to his own inhumanity, and his certificate of the
'public opinion' among South Carolina slaveholders 'of high degree.'
In an essay on the management of slaves, read before the Agricultural
Society of St. Johns, S.C. and published by the Society, Charleston,
1834, Mr. S. remarks:
"I consider _imprisonment in the stocks at night_, with or without
hard labor in the day, as a powerful auxiliary in the cause of _good_
government. To the correctness of this opinion _many_ can bear
testimony. EXPERIENCE has convinced ME that there is no punishment to
which the slave looks with more _horror_."
The advertisements of the Professors in the Medical Colleges of South
Carolina, published with comments--on pp. 169, 170, are additional
illustrations of the 'public opinion' of the _literati_.
That the 'public opinion' of _the highest class of society_ in South
Carolina, regards slaves a
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