It bewilders all the relations of human
responsibility, if we expect the insurrectionary slave to commit no
outrages; if slavery have 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.
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