This Overbearing Conduct Is So Ingrained, That It Shows Itself On The Most Trifling Occasions, In Their Intercourse With Their Fellow-Citizens.

Argumentative facts might be produced _ad infinitum_ to prove that the legal enactments for the government of the slave

States of America have been framed so as to vest in the proprietor as much control over the lives and persons of those they hold in servitude as any animal in the category of plantation stock. This in my tour through that region of moral darkness and despair, the state of Louisiana, I had numberless opportunities of observing, which would not fail to convince the most sceptical; and if I have passed over many of these in the foregoing pages, it is because the incidents themselves (though proving that the slightest approach to independent action, or opposition to the depraved wills of their tyrannical superiors, is at once visited with consequences that make me shudder to reflect upon) were of too trivial a nature to interest the general reader. I will, however, copy here an extract from a paper published in Virginia, the _Richmond Times_ for August, 1852, which must, I think, tend to remove any doubts, if they exist in the mind of the reader, that the conclusions I have come to from personal observation are correct, and sufficient to prove that the despotic Nicholas of Russia himself does not exercise more absolute control over the lives and liberties of the degraded serfs he rules, than the slave-appropriators of America do over their victims.

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