"TO PLANTERS AND OTHERS.—Wanted, _fifty negroes_. Any person
having sick negroes, considered incurable by their respective
physicians, and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash
for negroes affected with scrofula or king's evil, confirmed
hypocondriasm, apoplexy, diseases of the liver, kidneys, spleen,
stomach and intestines, bladder and its appendages, diarrhœa,
dysentery, &c. The highest cash price will be paid on application
as above."
The absolute barbarism of a 'public opinion' which not only tolerates,
but _produces_ such advertisements as this, was outdone by nothing
in the dark ages. If the reader has a heart of flesh, he can feel
it without help, and if he has not, comment will not create it. The
total indifference of slaveholders to such a cold-blooded proposition,
their utter unconsciousness of the paralysis of heart, and death of
sympathy, and every feeling of common humanity, for the slave, which it
reveals, is enough of itself to show that the tendency of the spirit
of slaveholding is, to kill in the soul whatever it touches. It has
no eyes to see, nor ears to hear, nor mind to understand, nor heart
to feel for its victims as _human beings_. To show that the above
indication of the savage state is not an index of individual feeling,
but of 'public opinion,' it is sufficient to say, that it appears to
be a standing advertisement in the Charleston Mercury, the leading
political paper of South Carolina, the organ of the Honorables John C.
Calhoun, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Hugh S. Legare, and others regarded
as the elite of her statesmen and literati. Besides, candidates
for popular favor, like the doctor who advertises for the fifty
'incurables,' take special care to conciliate, rather than outrage,
'public opinion.' Is the doctor so ignorant of 'public opinion' in his
own city, that he has unwittingly committed violence upon it in his
advertisement? We trow not. The same 'public opinion' which gave birth
to the advertisement of Dr. Stillman, and to those of the professors
in both medical institutions, founded the Charleston 'Work-House,'—a
soft name for a Moloch temple dedicated to torture, and reeking with
blood in the midst of the city; to which masters and mistresses send
their slaves of both sexes to be stripped, tied up, and cut with
the lash till the blood and mangled flesh flow to their feet, or to
be beaten and bruised with the terrible paddle, or forced to climb
the tread-mill till nature sinks, or to experience other nameless
torments.—_See Weld's American Slavery As it Is_, p. 171.