Argumentative facts might be produced _ad infinitum_ to prove that the
legal enactments for the government of the slave states of America have
been framed so as to vest in the proprietor as much control over the
lives and persons of those they hold in servitude as any animal in the
category of plantation stock. This in my tour through that region of
moral darkness and despair, the state of Louisiana, I had numberless
opportunities of observing, which would not fail to convince the most
sceptical; and if I have passed over many of these in the foregoing
pages, it is because the incidents themselves (though proving that the
slightest approach to independent action, or opposition to the depraved
wills of their tyrannical superiors, is at once visited with
consequences that make me shudder to reflect upon) were of too trivial a
nature to interest the general reader. I will, however, copy here an
extract from a paper published in Virginia, the _Richmond Times_ for
August, 1852, which must, I think, tend to remove any doubts, if they
exist in the mind of the reader, that the conclusions I have come to
from personal observation are correct, and sufficient to prove that the
despotic Nicholas of Russia himself does not exercise more absolute
control over the lives and liberties of the degraded serfs he rules,
than the slave-appropriators of America do over their victims.
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