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Show 148 THE MONTHLY OFFERING. not merely that such deeds are committed, but that they are frequent; not done in corners, but before the sun; not in one of the slave states, but in all of them; not per· petrated by brutal overseers and drivers merely •. but by macristrates, by legislators, by professors of rebg10n, by pre~chers of the gospel, by governors of states, by" gentle· men of property and standing," and by delicate females moving in the" highest circles of society.'' . . . The foregoing declarations touching the mfhct10ns up· on slaves, are not hap-hazard assertions, not the exagerations of fiction conjured up to carry a point; nor are they the rhapsodies of enthusiasm, nor crude conclusions, jumped at by hasty aud imperfect investigation, not the aimless outpourings either of sympathy or poetry; bu.t ~hey are proclamations of deliberate, well-weighed convictiOns, produced by accumulations of proof, by affirmatiou~ and affidavits, by written testimonies and statements ?f a cloud of witnesses who speak what they know and tesufy what they havs seen, and all these impregnably fortified by. proofs innumerable, in the relation of the slaveholder to his slave, the nature of atbitrary power, and the nature and history of man. Narrative ofNehimiah Caulkins. The author of the following interesting narrative, is Mr. Nehimiah Caulkins, ofWaterforJ, Connecticut, and who i! a h!ghly respected member of the Baptist church, in t~t town. Mr. Caulkins was introduced to the Executive Committee of the American Anti-slavery Society by twelve influential citizens of Waterford, embracing three justices of the Peace, two Physicians, one Commissioner of theCounty Court for New London, one Clergyman, one .~ost .Master, and one Deacon, as a man of high respectabtlrty, whose character for truth and veracity were unimpeatha• NARRATIVE OF NEHEMIAH ~AULKINS. 149 ble." We would urge upon the readers of the" Offering" to per~se with altentior. the following facts : "I feel it my duty to tell some thincrs that I know about slavery, in order, it possible, to awake~> more feelina at the North in behalf of the slave. Tlte treatment of th; slaves on the plantations where I had the greatest opportunity of gettrng knowledge, was not so bad as that on some neighborrng estates, where the owners were noted for their cruelty. There were, however, other estates in the vicinity, where the treatment was better; the slaves were better clothed and fed, were not worked so hard and more at-tention was paid to their quarters. ' The scenes that I have witnessed are enough to harrow up the soul; but could the slave be permitted to tell the st?ry of his sufferings, which no while man, not linked With slavery, is allowed to know, the land would vomit out the horrible ~ystem, slaveholders and all, if they would not unclrnch their grasp upon their defenceless victims. . I spent eleven winters between the years 1824 and 1835, In the state of North Carolina, mostly in the vicinity of Wilmington; and four out of the eleven on the estate of Mr. John Swan, five or six miles from that place. There were on his plantation about seventy slaves, male and female: some .were _married, and others lived together as man and wife, without even a mock ceremony. With ther ?wners generally, it is a matter of .indifference; the marnage of slaves not being recognized by the slave code. The slaves, however, think much of being married by a clergyman. The cabins or huts of the slaves were small and were built principally by the slaves themselves, as ihey could ~nd time on S~mdays and moonlight nights; they went mto the swamps, cut the logs, backed or hauled them to the quarters, and put up their cabins. When I first knew Mr. Swan's plantation, his overseer was a man who ~ad been a Methodist minister. He treated the. ~laves with great cruelty. His reasons for leaving the mmistry and becoming an overseer, as I was informed, |