show nothing to surpass it; "the lifted axe, the agonizing wheel," proved
powerless to subdue it; with every limb lopped, every bone broken, the
victims yet defied their tormentors, laughed, sang, and died triumphant.

Of course they repaid these atrocities in kind. If they had not, it would
have demonstrated the absurd paradox, that slavery educates higher
virtues than freedom. It bewilders all the relations of human
responsibility, if we expect the insurrectionary slave to commit no
outrages; if slavery has not depraved him, it has done him little harm.
If it be the normal tendency of bondage to produce saints like Uncle Tom,
let us all offer ourselves at auction immediately. It is Cassy and Dred
who are the normal protest of human nature against systems which degrade
it. Accordingly, these poor, ignorant Maroons, who had seen their
brothers and sisters flogged, burned, mutilated, hanged on iron hooks,
broken on the wheel, and had been all the while solemnly assured that
this was paternal government, could only repay the paternalism in the
same fashion, when they had the power. Stedman saw a negro chained to a
red-hot distillery-furnace; he saw disobedient slaves, in repeated
instances, punished by the amputation of a leg, and sent to boat-service
for the rest of their lives; and of course the rebels borrowed these
suggestions. They could bear to watch their captives expire under the
lash, for they had previously watched their parents. If the government
rangers received twenty-five florins for every rebel right-hand which
they brought in, of course they risked their own right hands in the
pursuit. The difference was, that the one brutality was that of a mighty
state, and the other was only the retaliation of the victims. And after
all, Stedman never ventures to assert that the imitation equalled the
original, or that the Maroons had inflicted nearly so much as they had
suffered.