with kindness, as none but fools and madmen wantonly destroy their own
property; further, that Northern visitors at the South come back
testifying to the kind treatment of the slaves, and that the slaves
themselves corroborate such representations. All these pleas, and
scores of others, are bruited in every corner of the free States; and
who that hath eyes to see, has not sickened at the blindness that saw
not, at the palsy of heart that felt not, or at the cowardice and
sycophancy that dared not expose such shallow fallacies. We are not to
be turned from our purpose by such vapid babblings. In their
appropriate places, we propose to consider these objections and
various others, and to show their emptiness and folly.

The foregoing declarations touching the inflictions upon slaves, are
not hap-hazard assertions, nor the exaggerations of fiction conjured
up to carry a point; nor are they the rhapsodies of enthusiasm, nor
crude conclusions, jumped at by hasty and imperfect investigation, nor
the aimless outpourings either of sympathy or poetry; but they are
proclamations of deliberate, well-weighed convictions, produced by
accumulations of proof, by affirmations and affidavits, by written
testimonies and statements of a cloud of witnesses who speak what they
know and testify what they have seen, and all these impregnably
fortified by proofs innumerable, in the relation of the slaveholder to
his slave, the nature of arbitrary power, and the nature and history
of man.

Of the witnesses whose testimony is embodied in the following pages, a
majority are slaveholders, many of the remainder have been
slaveholders, but now reside in free States.

Another class whose testimony will be given, consists of those who