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It was a beautiful Sunday in September, with a cloudless sky, and the rays of the sun parching the already thirsty earth, that Clotelle stood at an upper window in Slater's slave-pen in New Orleans, gasping for a breath of fresh air. The bells of thirty churches were calling the people to the different places of worship.
The house was easily explored, having no cellar nor outbuildings, and the trap to the slave-pen was locked fast. The girl's shawl and hat were also gone. "She's heard us, I reckon," the old woman muttered; "she's run away an' ruined me. Joe's cruel to me; Van Dorn is gone; without gold I go to the poor-house. McLane is pitiless "
Washington was a great slave mart, and her slave-pen was one of the most infamous in the whole land. One woman, who had escaped from it, was pursued in her flight across the long bridge, and was gaining on the four men who followed her, when they shouted to some on the Virginia shore, who ran and intercepted her.
He vituperates the poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a Mississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on the banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen and auction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon good taste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insults his readers.
Opposite McLane's room was the vestibule to the slave-pen in the garret, a room Van Dorn usually slept in.
Another section of the deck, twice as large as ours, was full of natives of both sexes, with their customary dogs, mats, blankets, pipes, calabashes of poi, fleas, and other luxuries and baggage of minor importance. As soon as we set sail the natives all lay down on the deck as thick as negroes in a slave-pen, and smoked, conversed, and spit on each other, and were truly sociable.
Alexandria was one of the greatest slave marts in Virginia. In the Avery slave-pen there was a dungeon- like room, designed for one standing, with iron staples to which the wrists were locked, and a sort of stocks for the feet, when a stream of cold water was pumped over the nude form of the refractory slave, from ten minutes to an hour or more, according to the offense.
The doors of Castle Thunder and Libby were opened, and the hand-cuffs were placed on their cruel keepers, who had made a boast of killing as many Yankees in these prisons as their troops were killing in battle. I went out some distance, October 3d, to an old camp, where a school was organized in an old slave-pen. Here was the stump of the whipping- post cut even with the ground.
If you ask why this was so how it was that the tragedy of an old Italian garden, or the sin of a lonely Puritan parish, or the crime of a provincial judge, should so stimulate his imagination with romantic appeals and harrowing allegories, while either it did not see a Carolina slave-pen, or found in it only a tame prosperity you must take your answer in the other question, why he did not weave into any of his stories the black and bloody thread of the Inquisition.
It was certainly very illogical; but his neighbors who owned slaves insisted upon turning up their noses at Mellasys, because he still kept up his slave-pen on Touchpitchalas Street, New Orleans.
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