What Burrud saw and heard convinced him that Northup’s memoir did not tell the whole truth, because the whole truth of slavery’s horror could not be told... His entry for May 21 condemned the savagery that made a slave of Northup and 4 million other men, women and children in the American South. “I took the opportunity to investigate this abominable sistem of slavery ... I have examend their instruments of torture the stocks whip and paddle and strap,” Burrud wrote. “Solomans book is true to the letter only it dos not portray the system as bad as it is it is not in the power of man to do it.” In other words, slavery was even worse than what Northup had written in his memoir. It defied description. That insight did not prevent Burrud from trying to portray the tools and scenes of torture — of slaves being collared, shackled and chained — that he witnessed. “I have seen these poor cretures come out of the woods with a heavy ring around their neck an one around their ankle and a heavy chain from one ring to the other some chaned up to stumps this was as the rebs expressed it to keep them from running away with the damd Yankes.”
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 17:59:18 +0000
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