This was an inexorable law, and punishment or fine
was sure to follow its dereliction, no excuse being available, and as
the owners seldom submitted to pay the fine, the slaves were compelled
to take the consequences, which, in the language that consigned them to
the cruel infliction, "consisted of from ten to twenty lashes, well laid
on with a raw-hide," a murderous whip, which draws blood after the first
few strokes, and is as torturing, I should imagine, as the Russian
knout, certainly proving in many instances as fatal as that odious
instrument. The crowning severity of the enactments I have referred to,
remains, however, to be told. So heinous in a negro, is the crime of
lifting his hand in opposition to a white man in South Carolina, that
the law adjudges that the offending member shall be forfeited. This is,
or was, quite as inexorable as the one I have before spoken of, and when
in Charleston, I frequently, amongst the flocks of negroes passing and
repassing, saw individuals with one hand only. Like the administration
of miscalled justice on negroes in all slave-holding states in America,
the process was summary; the offender was arrested, brought before the
bench of sitting magistrates, and on the _ex parte_[A] statement of his
accuser, condemned to mutilation, being at once marched out to the rear
of the building and the hand lopped off on a block fixed there for the
purpose.
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