Part 192 (2/2)
”A second and a third scene of the same kind occurred, and on the third occasion the altercation almost produced a battle between the elder and the carpenter.
”Kyle immediately arranged his affairs, packed up his tools and prepared to depart. 'Where are you going?' demanded Lewis. 'I am going home;' said Kyle. 'Then I will pay you nothing for what you have done,' retorted the slave driver, 'unless you complete your contract.' The carpenter went away with this edifying declaration, 'I will not stay here a day longer; for I expect the fire of G.o.d will come down and burn you up altogether, and I do not choose to go to h.e.l.l with you.' Through hush-money and promises not to whip the women any more, I believe Kyle returned and completed his engagement.
”James Kyle of Harrisonburg, Virginia, frequently narrated that circ.u.mstance, and his son, the carpenter, confirmed it with all the minute particulars combined with his temporary residence on the Shenandoah river.
”John M'Cue of Augusta county, Virginia, a _Presbyterian preacher_, frequently on the Lord's day morning, tied up his slaves and whipped them; and left them bound, while he went to the meeting house and preached--and after his return home repeated his scourging. That fact, with others more heinous, was known to all persons in his congregation and around the vicinity; and so far from being censured for it, he and his brethren justified it as essential to preserve their 'domestic inst.i.tutions.'
”Mrs. Pence, of Rockingham county, Virginia, used to boast,--'I am the best hand to whip a _wench_ in the whole county.' She used to pinion the girls to a post in the yard on the Lord's day morning, scourge them, put on the '_negro plaster_,' salt, pepper, and vinegar, leave them tied, and walk away to church as demure as a nun, and after service repeat her flaying, if she felt the whim. I once expostulated with her upon her cruelly. 'Mrs. Pence, how can you whip your girls so publicly and disturb your neighbors so on the Lord's day morning.'
Her answer was memorable. 'If I were to whip them on any other day I should lose a day's work; but by whipping them on Sunday, their backs get well enough by Monday morning.' That woman, if alive, is doubtless a member of the church now, as then.
”Rev. Dr. Staughton, formerly of Philadelphia, often stated, that when he lived at Georgetown, S.C. he could tell the doings of one of the slaveholders of the Baptist church there by his prayers at the prayer meeting. 'If,' said he, 'that man was upon good terms with his slaves, his words were cold and heartless as frost; if he had been whipping a man, he would pray with life; but if he had left a woman whom he had been flogging, tied to a post in his cellar, with a determination to go back and torture her again, O! how he would pray!'
The Rev. Cyrus P. Grosvenor of Ma.s.sachusetts can confirm the above statement by Dr. Staughton.
”William Wilson, a Presbyterian preacher of Augusta county, Virginia, had a young colored girl who was const.i.tutionally unhealthy. As no means to amend her were availing, he sold her to a member of his congregation, and in the usual style of human flesh dealers, warranted her 'sound,' &c. The fraud was instantly discovered; but he would not refund the amount. A suit was commenced, and was long continued, and finally the plaintiff recovered the money out of which he had been swindled by slave-trading with his own preacher. No Presbytery censured him, although Judge Brown, the chancellor, severely condemned the imposition.
”In the year 1811, Johab Graham, a preacher, lived with Alexander Nelson a Presbyterian elder, near Stanton, Virginia, and he informed me that a man had appeared before Nelson, who was a magistrate, and swore falsely against his slave,--that the elder ordered him thirty-nine lashes. All that wickedness was done as an excuse for his dissipated owner to obtain money. A negro trader had offered him a considerable sum for the 'boy,' and under the pretence of saving him from the punishment of the law, he was trafficked away from his woman and children to another state. The magistrate was aware of the perjury, and the whole abomination, but all the truth uttered by every colored person in the southern states would not be of any avail against the notorious false swearing of the greatest white villain who ever cursed the world. 'How,' said Johab Graham, can I preach to-morrow?' I replied, 'Very well; go and thunder the doctrine of retribution in their ears, Obadiah 15, till by the divine blessing you kill or cure them. My friends, John M. Nelson of Hillsborough, Ohio, Samuel Linn, and Robert Herron, and others of the same vicinity, could 'make both the ears of every one who heareth them tingle' with the accounts which they can give of slave-driving by professors of religion in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia.
”In 1815, near Frederick, in Maryland, a most barbarous planter was killed in a fit of desperation, by four of his slaves _in self-defence_. It was declared by those slaves while in prison that, besides his atrocities among their female a.s.sociates, he had deliberately butchered a number of his slaves. The four men were murdered by law, to appease the popular clamor. I saw them executed on the twenty-eighth day of Jan'y, 1816. The facts I received from the Rev. Patrick Davidson of Frederick, who constantly visited them during their imprisonment--and who became an abolitionist in consequence of the disclosures which he heard from those men in the jail. The name of the planter is not distinctly recollected, but it can be known by a inspection of the record of the trial in the clerk's office, Frederick.
”A minister of Virginia, still living, and whose name must not be mentioned for fear of Nero Preston and his confederate-hanging myrmidons, informed me of this fact in 1815, in his own house. 'A member of my church, said he, lately whipped a colored youth to death.
What shall I do?' I answered, 'I hope you do not mean to continue him in your church.' That minister replied, 'How can we help it'
We dare not call him to an account. We have no legal testimony.'
Their communion season was then approaching. I addressed his wife,--'Mrs. ---- do you mean to sit at the Lord's table with that murderer?'--,'Not I,' she answered: 'I would as soon commune with the devil himself.' The slave killer was equally unnoticed by the civil and ecclesiastical authority.
”John Baxter, a Presbyterian elder, the brother of that slaveholding doctor in divinity, George A. Baxter, held as a slave the wife of a Baptist colored preacher, familiarly called 'Uncle Jack.' In a late period of pregnancy he scourged her so that the lives of herself and her unborn child were considered in jeopardy. Uncle Jack was advised to obtain the liberation of his wife. Baxter finally agreed, I think, to sell the woman and her children, three of them, I believe for six hundred dollars, and an additional hundred if the unborn child survived a certain period after its birth. Uncle Jack was to pay one hundred dollars per annum for his wife and children for seven years, and Baxter held a sort of mortgage upon them for the payment. Uncle Jack showed me his back in furrows like a ploughed field. His master used to whip up the flesh, then beat it downwards, and then apply the 'negro plaster,' salt, pepper, mustard, and vinegar, until all Jack's back was almost as hard and unimpressible as the bones. There is slaveholding religion! A Presbyterian elder receiving from a Baptist preacher seven hundred dollars for his wife and children. James Kyle and uncle Jack used to tell that story with great Christian sensibility; and uncle Jack would weep tears of anguish over his wife's piteous tale, and tears of ecstasy at the same moment that he was free, and that soon, by the grace of G.o.d, his wife and children, as he said, 'would be all free together.'”
Rev. JAMES NOURSE, a Presbyterian clergyman of Mifflia co. Penn., whose father is, we believe, a slaveholder in Was.h.i.+ngton City, says,--
”The Rev. Mr. M----, now of the Huntingdon Presbytery, after an absence of many months, was about visiting his old friends on what is commonly called the 'Eastern Sh.o.r.e.' Late in the afternoon, on his journey, he called at the house of Rev. A.C. of P----town, Md. With this brother he had been long acquainted. Just at that juncture Mr. C. was about proceeding to whip a colored female, who was his slave. She was firmly tied to a post in FRONT of his dwelling-house. The arrival of a clerical visitor at such a time, occasioned a temporary delay in the execution of Mr. C's purpose. But the delay was only temporary; for not even the presence of such a guest could destroy the b.l.o.o.d.y design.
The guest interceded with all the mildness yet earnestness of a brother and new visitor. But all in vain, 'the woman had been saucy and must be punished.' The cowhide was accordingly produced, and the _Rev. Mr. C_., a large and very stout man, applied it 'manfully' on 'woman's' bare and 'shrinking flesh.' I say bare, because you know that the slave women generally have but three or four inches of the arm near the shoulder covered, and the neck is left entirely exposed.
As the cowhide moved back and forward, striking right and left, on the head, neck and arms, at every few strokes the sympathizing guest would exclaim, 'O, brother C. desist' But brother C. pursued his brutal work, till, after inflicting about sixty lashes, the woman was found to be suffused with blood on the hinder part of her neck, and under her frock between the shoulders. Yet this Rev. gentleman is well esteemed in the church--was, three or four years since, moderator of the synod of Philadelphia, and yet walks abroad, feeling himself unrebuked by law or gospel. Ah, sir does not this narration give fearful force to the query--_What has the church to do with slavery_?'
Comment on the facts is unnecessary, yet allow me to conclude by saying, that it is my opinion such occurrences _are not rare in the south_.
J.N.”
REV. CHARLES STEWART RENSHAW, of Quincy, Illinois, in a recent letter, speaking of his residence, for a period, in Kentucky, says--
”In a conversation with Mr. Robert Willis, he told me that his negro girl had run away from him some time previous. He was convinced that she was lurking round, and he watched for her. He soon found the place of her concealment, drew her from it, got a rope, and tied her hands across each other, then threw the rope over a beam in the kitchen, and hoisted her up by the wrists; 'and,' said he, 'I whipped her there till I made the lint fly, I tell you.' I asked him the meaning of making 'the lint fly,' and he replied, '_till the blood flew_.' I spoke of the iniquity and cruelty of slavery, and of its immediate abandonment. He confessed it an evil, but said, 'I am a _colonizationist_--I believe in that scheme.' Mr. Willis is a teacher of sacred music, and a member of the Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Kentucky.”
Mr. R. speaking of the PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER and church where he resided, says:
”The minister and all the church members held slaves. Some were treated kindly, others harshly. _There was not a shade of difference_ between their slaves and those of their _infidel_ neighbors, either in their physical, intellectual, or moral state: in some cases they would _suffer_ in the comparison.
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