Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1883 — Early Slavery in Sooth Carolina. [ARTICLE]

Early Slavery in Sooth Carolina.

Accordingly, in South Carolina, the negroes were worked to death, and the relations between the slave and him master were very different from what they were in Virginia and Maryland. The negroes in South Carolina were simply heathen savages; wedlock was almost unknown among them; they were kept in brute-like ignorance, and were often treated with barbarous cruelty. Consequently, instead of becoming softened in disposition and partially civilized, like their brethren in Maryland and Virginia, these negroes were as ugly and ferocious as any tribe of savages in Africa. Like the dog that is used to being kicked, they were always ready to snarl and bite. They were a dangerous class of society, prone to commit crimes of violence, and to run away or rise in rebellion when occasion offered. In the course of the eighteenth century there were several alarming insurrections, which were suppressed with atrocious barbarity. The planters lived in perpetual terror. A sort of standing army, in the shape of a well-dr l!ed militia 8,000 strong, was kept continually op duty, and part of the business of this militia was to visit all the plantations and search the negro quarters for concealed weapons. They were also au horized to flog any stray negro they might chance to meet, without stopping to ask questions. For the murder of a master or overseer negroes were sometimes burned at the stake, or exposed in an iron cage and left to starve. —John Fiske, in Harper’s Magazine.