their slaves. In doing this, absolute obedience and non-resistance are
fundamental principles established for the government of them, and
enforced by the severest penalties. All laws framed with respect to them,
give their masters such authority over them as is under few limitations.
Their power of correction may be said to be only not allowed to extend to
death. However severely beat and abused, no negro can bring an action
against his owner, or appear as an evidence against white men, in any
court of law or justice. Their natural rights as human creatures are
entirely disregarded, and punishments are commonly inflicted according to
the will of their master, however cruel and barbarous his disposition may
be. A common place of correction is instituted, to which they are sent to
receive such a number of stripes as their owners shall order, and such
blunders have been committed in giving and executing those orders, that
the innocent sometimes have suffered along with the guilty. In short,
such is their miserable condition, that they are exposed defenceless to
the insolence, caprice, and passions of owners, obliged to labour all
their life without any prospect of reward, or any hope of an end of their
toil until the day of their death. At the decease of their masters they
descend, like other estates of inheritance, to the heir at law, and
sometimes to thoughtless and giddy youth, habituated from their earliest
days to treat them like brutes. At other times, no doubt, they are more
fortunate, but their condition of life evidently subjects them to harsh
usage even from the best of masters, and we leave the world to judge what
they have to expect from the worst.

Indeed it must be acknowledged, in justice to the planters of Carolina in
general, that they treat their slaves with as much, and perhaps more
tenderness, than those of any British colony where slavery exists; yet a
disinterested stranger must observe, even among the best of masters,
several instances of cruelty and negligence in the manner of managing