He produced the photograph of a young female, apparently a quarteroon, sitting with back exposed naked to the hips,—her face so turned as to show an intelligent and rather handsome profile. The flesh was all welted, seamed, furrowed, and scarred, as if both by fire and the scourge. “There!” resumed Kenrick, “that I saw taken myself, and know it to be genuine. It is one out of many I have collected. The photograph cannot lie. It will be terrible as the recording angel in reflecting slavery as this civil war will unearth it. What will the Carlyles and the Gladstones say to this? Will it make them falter, think you, in their Sadducean hoot against a noble people who are manfully fighting the great battle of humanity against such infernalism as this?” “They would probably fall back on the doubter’s privilege.” “Yes, that’s the most decent way of escape. But I would pin them with the sharp fact. That woman (her name was Margaret) belonged to the Widow Gillespie,[31] on the Black River. Margaret had a nursing child, and, out of maternal tenderness, had disobeyed Mrs. Gillespie’s orders to wean it. For this she was subjected to _the punishment of the hand-saw_. She was laid on her face, her clothes stripped up to around her neck, her hands and feet held down, and Mrs. Gillespie, sitting by, then ‘paddled,’ or stippled the exposed body with the hand-saw. She then had Margaret turned over, and, with heated tongs, attempted to grasp her nipples. The writhings of the victim foiled her purpose; but between the breasts the skin and flesh were horribly burned.” “A favorite remark,” said Vance, “with our smug apologists of slavery, is, that an owner’s interests will make him treat a slave well. Undoubtedly in many cases so it is. But I have generally found that human malignity, anger, or revenge is more than a match for human avarice. A man will often gratify his spite even at the expense of his pocket.” Kenrick showed the photograph of a man with his back scarred as if by a shower of fire. “This poor fellow,” said Kenrick, “shows the effects of the _corn-husk punishment_; not an unusual one on some plantations. The victim is stretched out on the ground, with hands and feet held down. Dry corn-husks are then lighted, and the burning embers are whipped off with a stick so as to fall in showers of live sparks on the naked back. Such is the ‘patriarchal’ system! Such the tender mercies bestowed on ‘our man-servants and our maid-servants,’ as that artful dodger, Jeff Davis, calls our plantation slaves.” “And yet,” remarked Vance, “horrible as these things are, how small a part of the wrong of slavery is in the mere _physical_ suffering inflicted!” “Yes, the crowning outrage is mental and moral.” “This war,” resumed Vance, “is not sectional, nor geographical, nor, in a party sense, political: it is a war of eternally antagonistic principles,—Belial against Gabriel.”