The treatment of slaves in New Orleans as a general thing is horrid
in the extreme. There are many who are driven daily into the streets
and obliged to find work, and at night return with their wages, and if
they do not do it, are sent to the calaboose and whipped from fifty to
an hundred lashes. There are also hundreds of slaves owned by Irish
draymen, who are worked from fifteen to twenty hours a day, and do it
continually for months in succession. The most severe and cruel master
that ever had power over flesh and blood, is an unlearnt and ignorant
Irishman, and in New Orleans, you cannot frighten a negro so badly by
any thing that you may say or do, as to tell him you will sell him to
an Irishman. They almost prefer death to an Irish master, and they
certainly are the most unfeeling, inhuman monsters that can be found
on earth. There are also a large number of slaves who are obliged to
steal or beg their living, and yet are forced to work and give every
farthing they earn to their masters. The sleeping pens also of the
slaves generally are unfit for the meanest cur that runs the street;
and yet in connection with all this, the practice of whipping, kicking
and beating the slaves is so common that sympathy does not appear to
be one of the attributes of the human soul. An instance of severity
in punishment that came under my own observation, was inflicted on a
mulatto girl about twenty-three years old. She was whipped by a negro
trader, two hundred lashes and was literally cut to pieces. There was
scarcely a particle of skin on her back, and her breasts were torn open
in gashes and hung in shreds cut almost entirely from her body. Another
mulatto girl I saw who had been beaten by a _lady_, one of the wealthy,
_accomplished_ and fashionable women in the city. She knocked the girl
down, stamped on her head and face and broke out two of her front
teeth. She was blind with one eye, and her head and face was swollen as
full as the skin could be pressed.