tices which rival in cruelty the Roman practice of crucifying slaves. A slave who had killed his master “was roasted alive at a slow fire on the spot of the murder, in the presence of many thousand slaves, driven to the ground from all the adjoining counties; and when at length his life went out, the fire was intensified until his body was in ashes, which were scattered to the winds and trampled under foot.”[1] Mr. Olmsted gives the words of newspapers, even newspapers which from their moderation lie under the reproach of abolitionism, justifying such burnings of negroes as acts at once deliberate and indispensable. One editor, a Methodist preacher, says, “that the punishment was unequal to the crime, and that, had he been there, he would have suggested that the negro should be torn limb from limb with red-hot pincers, and that the limbs should afterwards have been burnt in a heap.” The burning of slaves alive, as well as crucifixion, was a part of the system of terror practised by the Romans.[2] The American master, it is said, sleeps with open doors. So did the Roman master: his guards were the vengeance of his class, the stake and the cross.
In the First Book of Kings (i. 39), two of the servants of Shimei run away to Achish, King of Gath. This, it is believed, is the sum total of the slave disturbances recorded in the annals of the Hebrew nation. The churlish Nabal, to excuse himself for refusing hospitality to David and his followers, pretends to believe
