iv.
"a voice of lamentation and weeping, and great mournng; Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not."
I have no doubt but the Foreign Slave Trade is quietly in operation in the United States; in confirmatian of which I quote the New Orleans Delta, which declares most positively it is so:—"African Slaves are imported into Mississippi and other sea-shores. In Mississippi there is a market for African Slaves, and on Plantations in that great and intrepid State, Negroes annually imported from Africa are at their daily work."
These Africans are bought by the Planters, and you pay for them by paying for the Cotton they cultivate. The amount of mortality on those Plantations is alarming, known only to those who are conversant with them, the necessary results of being over-worked and under-fed; when so they are without legal redress; consequently the average life of the Slaves on the Cotton Farms is fourteen years, and on the Sugar Plantations seven years. Here is the sacrifice not only of comfort and happiness, which the Slaves have as good a right to enjoy as ourselves, but of life itself, simply to augment our happiness, and to promote the interest of the Owners. I have repeatedly seen Slaves ordered to the fields to work before it was sufficiently light to weed Cotton without cutting it up, and then flogged because they did cut it up, and work at night as long as they could see how to work, without injury to the plant, which is very tender, and must be treated accordingly. As to the regulation of labour, the laws make the following provision:—In South Carolina, "Whereas, many Owners of Slaves, and others who have the care, management, and overseeing of Slaves, do confine them so closely to hard labour that they have not
