Tobacco Worms

Extract of a letter from Rev. C. S.Renshaw, pastor of the Congregational Church, Quincy, Illinois:  "Judge Menzies of Boone County, Kentucky, an elder in the Presbyterian Church, and a slaveholder, told me that he knew some overseers in the tobacco growing region of Virginia, who, to make their slaves careful in picking the tobacco (that is, taking the worms off, (you know what a loathsome thing the tobacco worm is) would make them eat some of the worms, and others who made them eat every worm they missed in picking."

from American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, by Theodore Dwight Weld, 1839