Old Virginia and her neighbours

330 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.celebrating their bloody achievement with potationsof rum ; in which plight they were soon dispersedwith slaughter, and theirringleaders weresummarily hanged.^The habit of carrying fire-arms to church waspart of a general system of patrol which grew outof the dread in which the planters lived. Thechief business of the patrol was to visit all theplantations within its districtat least once a fortnightand search the negro quarters for concealedweapons or stolen goods.^ The patrolmen alsohunted fugitives, and were authorized to flog straynegroes wherever found. The ordinary death penaltyfor the black man was hanging. Burning atthe stake was not unknown, but, as ICruelties. , , , . , , .have already mentioned, there is one instanceofsuch an execution in Massachusetts, andthere are several in New York, so that it cannotbe cited as illustrating any peculiarity of the SouthCarolina type of slavery. The most hideous instanceof cruelty recorded of South Carolina isthat of a slave who for the murder of an overseerwas left to starve in a cage suspended to the boughof a tree, where insects swarmed over his nakedflesh and birds had picked his eyes out before themercy of death overtook him.^ That such atro-^ Simms, History of South Carolina, p. 106 ; Williams, Historyof the Negro Race in America, i. 299.^ Whitney, " Government of the Colony of South Carolina,"Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, xiii. 95 ; Statutes of South Carolina,iii, 395-399, 456-461, 568-573.^ The story is told by St. John de Cr^veecenr, in his Letters froman American Farmer, Philadelphia, 1793, pp. 178—180. Cr^vecceurwas on his way to dine with a planter when he encountered theshocking spectacle. He succeeded in passing a shell of water