_In the press, by the same Author, complete in One Volume_,
AN ENGLISH TRAGEDY:
A PLAY,
IN FIVE ACTS.
MARY STUART.
TRANSLATED FROM SCHILLER.
A PLAY,
IN FIVE ACTS.
MLLE. DE BELLISLE.
TRANSLATED FROM DUMAS.
A PLAY,
IN FIVE ACTS.
JOURNAL
OF
A RESIDENCE ON A
GEORGIAN PLANTATION
1838-1839.
By FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE.
* * * * *
SLAVERY THE CHIEF CORNER STONE.
'This stone (Slavery), which was rejected by the first builders, is become
the chief stone of the corner in our new edifice.'--_Speech of_ ALEXANDER
H. STEPHENS _Vice-president of the Confederate States; delivered
March 21, 1861._
* * * * *
1863
TO
ELIZABETH DWIGHT SEDGWICK
THIS JOURNAL,
ORIGINALLY KEPT FOR HER,
IS
MOST AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED.
PREFACE.
The following diary was kept in the winter and spring of 1838-9, on an
estate consisting of rice and cotton plantations, in the islands at the
entrance of the Altamaha, on the coast of Georgia.
The slaves in whom I then had an unfortunate interest were sold some years
ago. The islands themselves are at present in the power of the Northern
troops. The record contained in the following pages is a picture of
conditions of human existence which I hope and believe have passed away.
LONDON:
_January 16, 1863._
JOURNAL.
Philadelphia: December 1838.
My Dear E----. I return you Mr. ----'s letter. I do not think it answers
any of the questions debated in our last conversation at all
satisfactorily: the _right_ one man has to enslave another, he has not the
hardihood to assert; but in the reasons he adduces to defend that act of
injustice, the contradictory statements he makes appear to me to refute
each other. He says, that to the continental European protesting against
the abstract iniquity of slavery, his answer would be, 'the slaves are
infinitely better off than half the continental peasantry.' To the
Englishman, 'they are happy compared with the miserable Irish.' But
supposing that this answered the question of original injustice, which it
does not, it is not a true reply. Though the negroes are fed, clothed, and
housed, and though the Irish peasant is starved, naked, and roofless, the
bare name of freeman--the lordship over his own person, the power to
choose and will--are blessings beyond food, raiment, or shelter;
possessing which, the want of every comfort of life is yet more tolerable
than their fullest enjoyment without them. Ask the thousands of ragged
destitutes who yearly land upon these shores to seek the means of
existence--ask the friendless, penniless foreign emigrant, if he will give
up his present misery, his future uncertainty, his doubtful and difficult
struggle for life, at once, for the secure, and as it is called, fortunate
dependance of the slave: the indignation with which he would spurn the
offer will prove that he possesses one good beyond all others, and that
his birthright as a man is more precious to him yet than the mess of
pottage for which he is told to exchange it because he is starving.
Of course the reverse alternative cannot be offered to the slaves, for
at the very word the riches of those who own them would make themselves
wings and flee away. But I do not admit the comparison between your
slaves and even the lowest class of European free labourers, for the
former are _allowed_ the exercise of no faculties but those which they
enjoy in common with the brutes that perish. The just comparison is
between the slaves and the useful animals to whose level your laws
reduce them; and I will acknowledge that the slaves of a kind owner may
be as well cared for, and as happy, as the dogs and horses of a merciful
master; but the latter condition--i.e. that of happiness--must again
depend upon the complete perfection of their moral and mental
degradation. Mr. ----, in his letter, maintains that they _are_ an
inferior race, and, compared with the whites, '_animals_, incapable of
mental culture and moral improvement:' to this I can only reply, that if
they are incapable of profiting by instruction, I do not see the
necessity for laws inflicting heavy penalties on those who offer it to
them. If they really are brutish, witless, dull, and devoid of capacity
for progress, where lies the _danger_ which is constantly insisted upon
of offering them that of which they are incapable. We have no laws
forbidding us to teach our dogs and horses as much as they can
comprehend; nobody is fined or imprisoned for reasoning upon knowledge,
and liberty, to the beasts of the field, for they are incapable of such
truths. But these themes are forbidden to slaves, not because they
cannot, but because they can and would seize on them with
avidity--receive them gladly, comprehend them quickly; and the masters'
power over them would be annihilated at once and for ever. But I have
more frequently heard, not that they were incapable of receiving
instruction, but something much nearer the truth--that knowledge only
makes them miserable: the moment they are in any degree enlightened,
they become unhappy. In the letter I return to you Mr. ---- says that
the very slightest amount of education, merely teaching them to read,
'impairs their value as slaves, for it instantly destroys their
contentedness, and since you do not contemplate changing their
condition, it is surely doing them an ill service to destroy their
acquiescence in it;' but this is a very different ground of argument
from the other. The discontent they evince upon the mere dawn of an
advance in intelligence proves not only that they can acquire but
combine ideas, a process to which it is very difficult to assign a
limit; and there indeed the whole question lies, and there and nowhere
else the shoe really pinches. A slave is ignorant; he eats, drinks,
sleeps, labours, and is happy. He learns to read; he feels, thinks,
reflects, and becomes miserable. He discovers himself to be one of a
debased and degraded race, deprived of the elementary rights which God
has granted to all men alike; every action is controlled, every word
noted; he may not stir beyond his appointed bounds, to the right hand or
to the left, at his own will, but at the will of another he may be sent
miles and miles of weary journeying--tethered, yoked, collared, and
fettered--away from whatever he may know as home, severed from all those
ties of blood and affection which he alone of all human, of all living
creatures on the face of the earth may neither enjoy in peace nor defend
when they are outraged. If he is well treated, if his master be
tolerably humane or even understand his own interest tolerably, this is
probably _all_ he may have to endure: it is only to the consciousness of
these evils that knowledge and reflection awaken him. But how is it if
his master be severe, harsh, cruel--or even only careless--leaving his
creatures to the delegated dominion of some overseer, or agent, whose
love of power, or other evil dispositions, are checked by no
considerations of personal interest? Imagination shrinks from the
possible result of such a state of things; nor must you, or Mr. ----,
tell me that the horrors thus suggested exist only in imagination. The
Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and
personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that
it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision,
insult, menace--the handcuff, the lash--the tearing away of children
from parents, of husbands from wives--the weary trudging in droves along
the common highways, the labour of body, the despair of mind, the
sickness of heart--these are the realities which belong to the system,
and form the rule, rather than the exception, in the slave's experience.
And this system exists here in this country of your's, which boasts
itself the asylum of the oppressed, the home of freedom, the one place
in all the world where all men may find enfranchisement from all
thraldoms of mind, soul, or body--the land elect of liberty.
Mr. ---- lays great stress, as a proof of the natural inferiority of the
blacks, on the little comparative progress they have made in those States
where they enjoy their freedom, and the fact that, whatever quickness of
parts they may exhibit while very young, on attaining maturity they
invariably sink again into inferiority, or at least mediocrity, and
indolence. But surely there are other causes to account for this besides
natural deficiency, which must, I think, be obvious to any unprejudiced
person observing the condition of the free blacks in your Northern
communities. If, in the early portion of their life, they escape the
contempt and derision of their white associates--if the blessed
unconsciousness and ignorance of childhood keeps them for a few years
unaware of the conventional proscription under which their whole race is
placed (and it is difficult to walk your streets, and mark the tone of
insolent superiority assumed by even the gutter-urchins over their dusky
cotemporaries, and imagine this possible)--as soon as they acquire the
first rudiments of knowledge, as soon as they begin to grow up and pass
from infancy to youth, as soon as they cast the first observing glance
upon the world by which they are surrounded, and the society of which,
they are members, they must become conscious that they are marked as the
Hebrew lepers of old, and are condemned to sit, like those unfortunates,
without the gates of every human and social sympathy. From their own sable
colour, a pall falls over the whole of God's universe to them, and they
find themselves stamped with a badge of infamy of Nature's own devising,
at sight of which all natural kindliness of man to man seems to recoil
from them. They are not slaves indeed, but they are pariahs; debarred from
all fellowship save with their own despised race--scorned by the lowest
white ruffian in your streets, not tolerated as companions even by the
foreign menials in your kitchen. They are free certainly, but they are
also degraded, rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs
of your society; they are free from the chain, the whip, the enforced task
and unpaid toil of slavery; but they are not the less under a ban. Their
kinship with slaves for ever bars them from a full share of the freeman's
inheritance of equal rights, and equal consideration and respect. All
hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky
skin, all tongues--the most vulgar, as well as the self-styled most
refined--have learnt to turn the very name of their race into an insult
and a reproach. How, in the name of all that is natural, probable,
possible, should the spirit and energy of any human creature support
itself under such an accumulation of injustice and obloquy? Where shall
any mass of men be found with power of character and mind sufficient to
bear up against such a weight of prejudice? Why, if one individual rarely
gifted by heaven were to raise himself out of such a slough of despond, he
would be a miracle; and what would be his reward? Would he be admitted to
an equal share in your political rights?--would he ever be allowed to
cross the threshold of your doors?--would any of you give your daughter to
his son, or your son to his daughter?--would you, in any one particular,
admit him to the footing of equality which any man with a white skin would
claim, whose ability and worth had so raised him from the lower degrees of
the social scale. You would turn from such propositions with abhorrence,
and the servants in your kitchen and stable--the ignorant and boorish
refuse of foreign populations, in whose countries no such prejudice
exists, imbibing it with the very air they breathe here--would shrink from
eating at the same table with such a man, or holding out the hand of
common fellowship to him. Under the species of social proscription in
which the blacks in your Northern cities exist, if they preserved energy
of mind, enterprise of spirit, or any of the best attributes and powers of
free men, they would prove themselves, instead of the lowest and least of
human races, the highest and first, not only of all that do exist, but of
all that ever have existed; for they alone would seek and cultivate
knowledge, goodness, truth, science, art, refinement, and all improvement,
purely for the sake of their own excellence, and without one of those
incentives of honour, power, and fortune, which are found to be the chief,
too often the only, inducements which lead white men to the pursuit of the
same objects.
You know very well dear E----, that in speaking of the free blacks of the
North I here state nothing but what is true and of daily experience. Only
last week I heard, in this very town of Philadelphia, of a family of
strict probity and honour, highly principled, intelligent, well-educated,
and accomplished, and (to speak the world's language) respectable in every
way--i.e. _rich_. Upon an English lady's stating it to be her intention to
visit these persons when she came to Philadelphia, she was told that if
she did nobody else would visit _her_; and she probably would excite a
malevolent feeling, which might find vent in some violent demonstration
against this family. All that I have now said of course bears only upon
the condition of the free coloured population of the North, with which I
am familiar enough to speak confidently of it. As for the slaves, and
their capacity for progress, I can say nothing, for I have never been
among them to judge what faculties their unhappy social position leaves to
them unimpaired. But it seems to me, that no experiment on a sufficiently
large scale can have been tried for a sufficient length of time to
determine the question of their incurable inferiority. Physiologists say
that three successive generations appear to be necessary to produce an
effectual change of constitution (bodily and mental), be it for health or
disease. There are positive physical defects which produce positive mental
ones; the diseases of the muscular and nervous systems descend from father
to son. Upon the agency of one corporal power how much that is not
corporal depends; from generation to generation internal disease and
external deformity, vices, virtues, talents, and deficiencies are
transmitted, and by the action of the same law it must be long indeed
before the offspring of slaves--creatures begotten of a race debased and
degraded to the lowest degree, themselves born in slavery, and whose
progenitors have eaten the bread and drawn the breath of slavery for
years--can be measured, with any show of justice, by even the least
favoured descendants of European nations, whose qualities have been for
centuries developing themselves under the beneficent influence of freedom,
and the progress it inspires.
I am rather surprised at the outbreak of violent disgust which Mr. ----
indulges in on the subject of amalgamation; as that formed no part of
our discussion, and seems to me a curious subject for abstract argument. I
should think the intermarrying between blacks and whites a matter to be as
little insisted upon if repugnant, as prevented if agreeable to the
majority of the two races. At the same time, I cannot help being
astonished at the furious and ungoverned execration which all reference to
the possibility of a fusion of the races draws down upon those who suggest
it; because nobody pretends to deny that, throughout the South, a large
proportion of the population is the offspring of white men and coloured
women. In New Orleans, a class of unhappy females exists whose mingled
blood does not prevent their being remarkable for their beauty, and with
whom no man, no _gentleman_, in that city shrinks from associating; and
while the slaveowners of the Southern States insist vehemently upon the
mental and physical inferiority of the blacks, they are benevolently doing
their best, in one way at least, to raise and improve the degraded race,
and the bastard population which forms so ominous an element in the social
safety of their cities certainly exhibit in their forms and features the
benefit they derive from their white progenitors. It is hard to conceive
that some mental improvement does not accompany this physical change.
Already the finer forms of the European races are cast in these dusky
moulds: the outward configuration can hardly thus improve without
corresponding progress in the inward capacities. The white man's blood and
bones have begotten this bronze race, and bequeathed to it in some degree
qualities, tendencies, capabilities, such as are the inheritance of the
highest order of human animals. Mr. ---- (and many others) speaks as if
there were a natural repugnance in all whites to any alliance with the
black race; and yet it is notorious, that almost every Southern planter
has a family more or less numerous of illegitimate coloured children. Most
certainly, few people would like to assert that such connections are
formed because it is the _interest_ of these planters to increase the
number of their human property, and that they add to their revenue by the
closest intimacy with creatures that they loathe, in order to reckon
among their wealth the children of their body. Surely that is a monstrous
and unnatural supposition, and utterly unworthy of belief. That such
connections exist commonly, is a sufficient proof that they are not
abhorrent to nature; but it seems, indeed, as if marriage (and not
concubinage) was the horrible enormity which cannot be tolerated, and
against which, moreover, it has been deemed expedient to enact laws. Now
it appears very evident that there is no law in the white man's nature
which prevents him from making a coloured woman the mother of his
children, but there _is_ a law on his statute books forbidding him to make
her his wife; and if we are to admit the theory that the mixing of the
races is a monstrosity, it seems almost as curious that laws should be
enacted to prevent men marrying women towards whom they have an invincible
natural repugnance, as that education should by law be prohibited to
creatures incapable of receiving it. As for the exhortation with which
Mr. ---- closes his letter, that I will not 'go down to my husband's
plantation prejudiced against what I am to find there,' I know not well
how to answer it. Assuredly I _am_ going prejudiced against slavery, for I
am an Englishwoman, in whom the absence of such a prejudice would be
disgraceful. Nevertheless, I go prepared to find many mitigations in the
practice to the general injustice and cruelty of the system--much kindness
on the part of the masters, much content on that of the slaves; and I feel
very sure that you may rely upon the carefulness of my observation, and
the accuracy of my report, of every detail of the working of the thing
that comes under my notice; and certainly, on the plantation to which I am
going, it will be more likely that I should some things extenuate, than
set down aught in malice.
Yours ever faithfully.
* * * * *
Darien, Georgia.
Dear E----. Minuteness of detail, and fidelity in the account of my daily
doings, will hardly, I fear, render my letters very interesting to you
now; but cut off as I am here from all the usual resources and amusements
of civilised existence, I shall find but little to communicate to you that
is not furnished by my observations on the novel appearance of external
nature, and the moral and physical condition of Mr. ----'s people. The
latter subject is, I know, one sufficiently interesting in itself to you,
and I shall not scruple to impart all the reflections which may occur to
me relative to their state during my stay here, where enquiry into their
mode of existence will form my chief occupation, and, necessarily also,
the staple commodity of my letters. I purpose, while I reside here,
keeping a sort of journal, such as Monk Lewis wrote during his visit to
his West India plantations. I wish I had any prospect of rendering my
diary as interesting and amusing to you as his was to me.
In taking my first walk on the island, I directed my steps towards the
rice mill, a large building on the banks of the river, within a few yards
of the house we occupy. Is it not rather curious that Miss Martineau
should have mentioned the erection of a steam mill for threshing rice
somewhere in the vicinity of Charleston as a singular novelty, likely to
form an era in Southern agriculture, and to produce the most desirable
changes in the system of labour by which it is carried on? Now, on this
estate alone, there are three threshing mills--one worked by steam, one by
the tide, and one by horses; there are two private steam mills on
plantations adjacent to ours, and a public one at Savannah, where the
planters who have none on their own estates are in the habit of sending
their rice to be threshed at a certain percentage; these have all been in
operation for some years, and I therefore am at a loss to understand what
made her hail the erection of the one at Charleston as likely to produce
such immediate and happy results. By the bye--of the misstatements, or
rather mistakes, for they are such, in her books, with regard to certain
facts--her only disadvantage in acquiring information was not by any means
that natural infirmity on which the periodical press, both here and in
England, has commented with so much brutality. She had the misfortune to
possess, too, that unsuspecting reliance upon the truth of others which
they are apt to feel who themselves hold truth most sacred: and this was
a sore disadvantage to her in a country where I have heard it myself
repeatedly asserted--and, what is more, much gloried in--that she was
purposely misled by the persons to whom she addressed her enquiries, who
did not scruple to disgrace themselves by imposing in the grossest manner
upon her credulity and anxiety to obtain information. It is a knowledge of
this very shameful proceeding, which has made me most especially anxious
to avoid _fact hunting_. I might fill my letters to you with accounts
received from others, but as I am aware of the risk which I run in so
doing, I shall furnish you with no details but those which come under my
own immediate observation. To return to the rice mill: it is worked by a
steam-engine of thirty horse power, and besides threshing great part of
our own rice, is kept constantly employed by the neighbouring planters,
who send their grain to it in preference to the more distant mill at
Savannah, paying, of course, the same percentage, which makes it a very
profitable addition to the estate. Immediately opposite to this building
is a small shed, which they call the cook's shop, and where the daily
allowance of rice and corn grits of the people is boiled and distributed
to them by an old woman, whose special business this is. There are four
settlements or villages (or, as the negroes call them, camps) on the
island, consisting of from ten to twenty houses, and to each settlement is
annexed a cook's shop with capacious cauldrons, and the oldest wife of
the settlement for officiating priestess. Pursuing my walk along the
river's bank, upon an artificial dyke, sufficiently high and broad to
protect the fields from inundation by the ordinary rising of the tide--for
the whole island is below high water mark--I passed the blacksmith's and
cooper's shops. At the first all the common iron implements of husbandry
or household use for the estate are made, and at the latter all the rice
barrels necessary for the crop, besides tubs and buckets large and small
for the use of the people, and cedar tubs of noble dimensions and
exceedingly neat workmanship, for our own household purposes. The
fragrance of these when they are first made, as well as their ample size,
renders them preferable as dressing-room furniture, in my opinion, to all
the china foot-tubs that ever came out of Staffordshire. After this I got
out of the vicinity of the settlement, and pursued my way along a narrow
dyke--the river on one hand, and on the other a slimy, poisonous-looking
swamp, all rattling with sedges of enormous height, in which one might
lose one's way as effectually as in a forest of oaks. Beyond this, the low
rice-fields, all clothed in their rugged stubble, divided by dykes into
monotonous squares, a species of prospect by no means beautiful to the
mere lover of the picturesque. The only thing that I met with to attract
my attention was a most beautiful species of ivy, the leaf longer and more
graceful than that of the common English creeper, glittering with the
highest varnish, delicately veined, and of a rich brown green, growing in
profuse garlands from branch to branch of some stunted evergreen bushes
which border the dyke, and which the people call salt-water bush. My walks
are rather circumscribed, inasmuch as the dykes are the only promenades.
On all sides of these lie either the marshy rice-fields, the brimming
river, or the swampy patches of yet unreclaimed forest, where the huge
cypress trees and exquisite evergreen undergrowth spring up from a
stagnant sweltering pool, that effectually forbids the foot of the
explorer.
As I skirted one of these thickets to-day, I stood still to admire the
beauty of the shrubbery. Every shade of green, every variety of form,
every degree of varnish, and all in full leaf and beauty in the very depth
of winter. The stunted dark-coloured oak; the magnolia bay (like our own
culinary and fragrant bay), which grows to a very great size; the wild
myrtle, a beautiful and profuse shrub, rising to a height of six, eight,
and ten feet, and branching on all sides in luxuriant tufted fullness;
most beautiful of all, that pride of the South, the magnolia grandiflora,
whose lustrous dark green perfect foliage would alone render it an object
of admiration, without the queenly blossom whose colour, size, and perfume
are unrivalled in the whole vegetable kingdom. This last magnificent
creature grows to the size of a forest tree in these swamps, but seldom
adorns a high or dry soil, or suffers itself to be successfully
transplanted. Under all these the spiked palmetto forms an impenetrable
covert, and from glittering graceful branch to branch hang garlands of
evergreen creepers, on which the mocking-birds are swinging and singing
even now; while I, bethinking me of the pinching cold that is at this hour
tyrannising over your region, look round on this strange scene--on these
green woods, this unfettered river, and sunny sky--and feel very much like
one in another planet from yourself.
The profusion of birds here is one thing that strikes me as curious,
coming from the vicinity of Philadelphia, where even the robin redbreast,
held sacred by the humanity of all other Christian people, is not safe
from the _gunning_ prowess of the unlicensed sportsmen of your free
country. The negroes (of course) are not allowed the use of firearms, and
their very simply constructed traps do not do much havoc among the
feathered hordes that haunt their rice-fields. Their case is rather a hard
one, as partridges, snipes, and the most delicious wild ducks abound here,
and their allowance of rice and Indian meal would not be the worse for
such additions. No day passes that I do not, in the course of my walk, put
up a number of the land birds, and startle from among the gigantic sedges
the long-necked water-fowl by dozens. It arouses the killing propensity in
me most dreadfully, and I really entertain serious thoughts of learning to
use a gun, for the mere pleasure of destroying these pretty birds as they
whirr from their secret coverts close beside my path. How strong an
instinct of animal _humanity_ this is, and how strange if one be more
strange than another. Reflection rebukes it almost instantaneously, and
yet for the life of me I cannot help wishing I had a fowling-piece
whenever I put up a covey of these creatures; though I suppose, if one
were brought bleeding and maimed to me, I should begin to cry, and be very
pathetic, after the fashion of Jacques. However, one must live, you know;
and here our living consists very mainly of wild ducks, wild geese, wild
turkeys, and venison. Nor, perhaps, can one imagine the universal doom
overtaking a creature with less misery than in the case of the bird who,
in the very moment of his triumphant soaring, is brought dead to the
ground. I should like to bargain for such a finis myself, amazingly, I
know; and have always thought that the death I should prefer would be to
break my neck off the back of my horse at a full gallop on a fine day. Of
course a bad shot should be hung--a man who shatters his birds' wings and
legs; if I undertook the trade, I would learn of some Southern duellist,
and always shoot my bird through the head or heart--as an expert murderer
knows how. Besides these birds of which we make our prey, there are others
that prey upon their own fraternity. Hawks of every sort and size wheel
their steady rounds above the rice-fields; and the great turkey
buzzards--those most unsightly carrion birds--spread their broad black
wings, and soar over the river like so many mock eagles. I do not know
that I ever saw any winged creature of so forbidding an aspect as these
same turkey buzzards; their heavy flight, their awkward gait, their
bald-looking head and neck, and their devotion to every species of foul
and detestable food, render them almost abhorrent to me. They abound in
the South, and in Charleston are held in especial veneration for their
scavenger-like propensities, killing one of them being, I believe, a
fineable offence by the city police regulations. Among the Brobdignagian
sedges that in some parts of the island fringe the Altamaha, the
nightshade (apparently the same as the European creeper) weaves a perfect
matting of its poisonous garlands, and my remembrance of its prevalence in
the woods and hedges of England did not reconcile me to its appearance
here. How much of this is mere association I cannot tell; but whether the
wild duck makes its nest under its green arches, or the alligators and
snakes of the Altamaha have their secret bowers there, it is an
evil-looking weed, and I shall have every leaf of it cleared away.
I must inform you of a curious conversation which took place between my
little girl and the woman who performs for us the offices of chambermaid
here--of course one of Mr. ----'s slaves. What suggested it to the child,
or whence indeed she gathered her information, I know not; but children
are made of eyes and ears, and nothing, however minute, escapes their
microscopic observation. She suddenly began addressing this woman. 'Mary,
some persons are free and some are not (the woman made no reply). I am a
free person (of a little more than three years old). I say, I am a free
person, Mary--do you know that?' 'Yes, missis.' 'Some persons are free and
some are not--do you know that, Mary?' 'Yes, missis, _here_,' was the
reply; 'I know it is so here, in this world.' Here my child's white nurse,
my dear Margery, who had hitherto been silent, interfered, saying, 'Oh,
then you think it will not always be so?' 'Me hope not, missis.' I am
afraid, E----, this woman actually imagines that there will be no slaves
in Heaven; isn't that preposterous now? when by the account of most of the
Southerners slavery itself must be Heaven, or something uncommonly like
it. Oh, if you could imagine how this title 'Missis,' addressed to me and
to my children, shocks all my feelings! Several times I have exclaimed,
'For God's sake do not call me that!' and only been awakened, by the
stupid amazement of the poor creatures I was addressing, to the perfect
uselessness of my thus expostulating with them; once or twice indeed I
have done more--I have explained to them, and they appeared to comprehend
me well, that I had no ownership over them, for that I held such ownership
sinful, and that, though I was the wife of the man who pretends to own
them, I was in truth no more their mistress than they were mine. Some of
them I know understood me, more of them did not.
Our servants--those who have been selected to wait upon us in the
house--consist of a man, who is quite a tolerable cook (I believe this is
a natural gift with them, as with Frenchmen); a dairywoman, who churns for
us; a laundrywoman; her daughter, our housemaid, the aforesaid Mary; and
two young lads of from fifteen to twenty, who wait upon us in the capacity
of footmen. As, however, the latter are perfectly filthy in their persons
and clothes--their faces, hands, and naked feet being literally encrusted
with dirt--their attendance at our meals is not, as you may suppose,
particularly agreeable to me, and I dispense with it as often as possible.
Mary, too, is so intolerably offensive in her person that it is impossible
to endure her proximity, and the consequence is that, amongst Mr. ----'s
slaves, I wait upon myself more than I have ever done in my life before.
About this same personal offensiveness, the Southerners you know insist
that it is inherent with the race, and it is one of their most cogent
reasons for keeping them as slaves. But as this very disagreeable
peculiarity does not prevent Southern women from hanging their infants at
the breasts of negresses, nor almost every planter's wife and daughter
from having one or more little pet blacks sleeping like puppy dogs in
their very bedchamber, nor almost every planter from admitting one or
several of his female slaves to the still closer intimacy of his bed--it
seems to me that this objection to doing them right is not very valid. I
cannot imagine that they would smell much worse if they were free, or come
in much closer contact with the delicate organs of their white, fellow
countrymen; indeed, inasmuch as good deeds are spoken of as having a sweet
savour before God, it might be supposed that the freeing of the blacks
might prove rather an odoriferous process than the contrary. However this
may be, I must tell you that this potent reason for enslaving a whole race
of people is no more potent with me than most of the others adduced to
support the system, inasmuch as, from observation and some experience, I
am strongly inclined to believe that peculiar ignorance of the laws of
health and the habits of decent cleanliness are the real and only causes
of this disagreeable characteristic of the race--thorough ablutions and
change of linen, when tried, having been perfectly successful in removing
all such objections; and if ever you have come into anything like
neighbourly proximity with a low Irishman or woman, I think you will allow
that the same causes produce very nearly the same effects. The stench in
an Irish, Scotch, Italian, or French hovel are quite as intolerable as any
I ever found in our negro houses, and the filth and vermin which abound
about the clothes and persons of the lower peasantry of any of those
countries as abominable as the same conditions in the black population of
the United States. A total absence of self-respect begets these hateful
physical results, and in proportion as moral influences are remote,
physical evils will abound. Well-being, freedom, and industry induce
self-respect, self-respect induces cleanliness and personal attention, so
that slavery is answerable for all the evils that exhibit themselves where
it exists--from lying, thieving, and adultery, to dirty houses, ragged
clothes, and foul smells.
But to return to our Ganymedes. One of them--the eldest son of our
laundrywoman, and Mary's brother, a boy of the name of Aleck
(Alexander)--is uncommonly bright and intelligent; he performs all the
offices of a well-instructed waiter with great efficiency, and anywhere
out of slave land would be able to earn fourteen or fifteen dollars a
month for himself; he is remarkably good tempered and well disposed. The
other poor boy is so stupid that he appears sullen from absolute darkness
of intellect; instead of being a little lower than the angels, he is
scarcely a little higher than the brutes, and to this condition are
reduced the majority of his kind by the institutions under which they
live. I should tell you that Aleck's parents and kindred have always been
about the house of the overseer, and in daily habits of intercourse with
him and his wife; and wherever this is the case the effect of involuntary
education is evident in the improved intelligence of the degraded race.
In a conversation which Mr. ---- had this evening with Mr. O----, the
overseer, the latter mentioned that two of our carpenters had in their
leisure time made a boat, which they had disposed of to some neighbouring
planter for sixty dollars.
Now, E----, I have no intention of telling you a one-sided story, or
concealing from you what are cited as the advantages which these poor
people possess; you, who know that no indulgence is worth simple justice,
either to him who gives or him who receives, will not thence conclude that
their situation thus mitigated is, therefore, what it should be. On this
matter of the sixty dollars earned by Mr. ----'s two men much stress was
laid by him and his overseer. I look at it thus: if these men were
industrious enough out of their scanty leisure to earn sixty dollars, how
much more of remuneration, of comfort, of improvement might they not have
achieved were the price of their daily labour duly paid them, instead of
being unjustly withheld to support an idle young man and his idle
family--i.e. myself and my children.
And here it may be well to inform you that the slaves on this plantation
are divided into field hands and mechanics or artisans. The former, the
great majority, are the more stupid and brutish of the tribe; the others,
who are regularly taught their trades, are not only exceedingly expert at
them, but exhibit a greater general activity of intellect, which must
necessarily result from even a partial degree of cultivation. There are
here a gang (for that is the honourable term) of coopers, of blacksmiths,
of bricklayers, of carpenters--all well acquainted with their peculiar
trades. The latter constructed the wash-hand stands, clothes presses,
sofas, tables, &c, with which our house is furnished, and they are very
neat pieces of workmanship--neither veneered or polished indeed, nor of
very costly materials, but of the white pine wood planed as smooth as
marble--a species of furniture not very luxurious perhaps, but all the
better adapted therefore to the house itself, which is certainly rather
more devoid of the conveniences and adornments of modern existence than
anything I ever took up my abode in before. It consists of three small
rooms, and three still smaller, which would be more appropriately
designated as closets, a wooden recess by way of pantry, and a kitchen
detached from the dwelling--a mere wooden outhouse, with no floor but the
bare earth, and for furniture a congregation of filthy negroes, who lounge
in and out of it like hungry hounds at all hours of the day and night,
picking up such scraps of food as they can find about, which they discuss
squatting down upon their hams, in which interesting position and
occupation I generally find a number of them whenever I have sufficient
hardihood to venture within those precincts, the sight of which and its
tenants is enough to slacken the appetite of the hungriest hunter that
ever lost all nice regards in the mere animal desire for food. Of our
three apartments, one is our sitting, eating, and _living_ room, and is
sixteen feet by fifteen. The walls are plastered indeed, but neither
painted nor papered; it is divided from our bed-room (a similarly elegant
and comfortable chamber) by a dingy wooden partition covered all over with
hooks, pegs, and nails, to which hats, caps, keys, &c. &c., are suspended
in graceful irregularity. The doors open by wooden latches, raised by
means of small bits of packthread--I imagine, the same primitive order of
fastening celebrated in the touching chronicle of Red Riding Hood; how
they shut I will not pretend to describe, as the shutting of a door is a
process of extremely rare occurrence throughout the whole Southern
country. The third room, a chamber with sloping ceiling, immediately over
our sitting-room and under the roof, is appropriated to the nurse and my
two babies. Of the closets, one is Mr. ---- the overseer's bed-room, the
other his office or place of business; and the third, adjoining our
bed-room, and opening immediately out of doors, is Mr. ----'s dressing
room and cabinet d'affaires, where he gives audiences to the negroes,
redresses grievances, distributes red woollen caps (a singular
gratification to a slave), shaves himself, and performs the other offices
of his toilet. Such being our abode, I think you will allow there is
little danger of my being dazzled by the luxurious splendours of a
Southern slave residence. Our sole mode of summoning our attendants is by
a packthread bell-rope suspended in the sitting-room. From the bed-rooms
we have to raise the windows and our voices, and bring them by power of
lungs, or help ourselves--which, I thank God, was never yet a hardship to
me.
I mentioned to you just now that two of the carpenters had made a boat in
their leisure time. I must explain this to you, and this will involve the
mention of another of Miss Martineau's mistakes with regard to slave
labour, at least in many parts of the Southern States. She mentions that
on one estate of which she knew, the proprietor had made the experiment,
and very successfully, of appointing to each of his slaves a certain task
to be performed in the day, which once accomplished, no matter how early,
the rest of the four and twenty hours were allowed to the labourer to
employ as he pleased. She mentions this as a single experiment, and
rejoices over it as a decided amelioration in the condition of the slave,
and one deserving of general adoption. But in the part of Georgia where
this estate is situated, the custom of task labour is universal, and it
prevails, I believe, throughout Georgia, South Carolina, and parts of
North Carolina; in other parts of the latter State, however--as I was
informed by our overseer, who is a native of that State--the estates are
small, rather deserving the name of farms, and the labourers are much
upon the same footing as the labouring men at the North, working from
sunrise to sunset in the fields with the farmer and his sons, and coming
in with them to their meals, which they take immediately after the rest of
the family. In Louisiana and the new South-western Slave States, I
believe, task labour does not prevail; but it is in those that the
condition of the poor human cattle is most deplorable, as you know it was
there that the humane calculation was not only made, but openly and
unhesitatingly avowed, that the planters found it upon the whole their
most profitable plan to work off (kill with labour) their whole number of
slaves about once in seven years, and renew the whole stock. By the bye,
the Jewish institution of slavery is much insisted upon by the Southern
upholders of the system; perhaps this is their notion of the Jewish
jubilee, when the slaves were by Moses' strict enactment to be all set
free. Well, this task system is pursued on this estate; and thus it is
that the two carpenters were enabled to make the boat they sold for sixty
dollars. These tasks, of course, profess to be graduated according to the
sex, age, and strength of the labourer; but in many instances this is not
the case, as I think you will agree when I tell you that on Mr. ----'s
first visit to his estates he found that the men and the women who
laboured in the fields had the same task to perform. This was a noble
admission of female equality, was it not?--and thus it had been on the
estate for many years past. Mr. ----, of course, altered the distribution
of the work, diminishing the quantity done by the women.
I had a most ludicrous visit this morning from the midwife of the
estate--rather an important personage both to master and slave, as to her
unassisted skill and science the ushering of all the young negroes into
their existence of bondage is entrusted. I heard a great deal of
conversation in the dressing-room adjoining mine, while performing my own
toilet, and presently Mr. ---- opened my room-door, ushering in a dirty
fat good-humoured looking old negress, saying, 'The midwife, Rose, wants
to make your acquaintance.' 'Oh massa!' shrieked out the old creature in a
paroxysm of admiration, 'where you get this lilly alablaster baby!' For a
moment I looked round to see if she was speaking of my baby; but no, my
dear, this superlative apostrophe was elicited by the fairness of _my
skin_--so much for degrees of comparison. Now, I suppose that if I chose
to walk arm in arm with the dingiest mulatto through the streets of
Philadelphia, nobody could possibly tell by my complexion that I was not
his sister, so that the mere quality of mistress must have had a most
miraculous effect upon my skin in the eyes of poor Rose. But this species
of outrageous flattery is as usual with these people as with the low
Irish, and arises from the ignorant desire, common to both the races, of
propitiating at all costs the fellow-creature who is to them as a
Providence--or rather, I should say, a fate--for 't is a heathen and no
Christian relationship. Soon after this visit, I was summoned into the
wooden porch or piazza of the house, to see a poor woman who desired to
speak to me. This was none other than the tall emaciated-looking negress
who, on the day of our arrival, had embraced me and my nurse with such
irresistible zeal. She appeared very ill to-day, and presently unfolded to
me a most distressing history of bodily afflictions. She was the mother of
a very large family, and complained to me that, what with child-bearing
and hard field labour, her back was almost broken in two. With an almost
savage vehemence of gesticulation she suddenly tore up her scanty
clothing, and exhibited a spectacle with which I was inconceivably shocked
and sickened. The facts, without any of her corroborating statements, bore
tolerable witness to the hardships of her existence. I promised to attend
to her ailments and give her proper remedies; but these are natural
results, inevitable and irremediable ones, of improper treatment of the
female frame--and though there may be alleviation, there cannot be any
cure when once the beautiful and wonderful structure has been thus made
the victim of ignorance, folly, and wickedness.