there, nor ever saw again any of the poor people among whom I lived during
this winter, but Jack, once, under sad circumstances. The poor lad's
health failed so completely, that his owners humanely brought him to the
north, to try what benefit he might derive from the change; but this was
before the passing of the Fugitive Slave Bill, when touching the soil of
the northern states, a slave became free; and such was the apprehension
felt lest Jack should be enlightened as to this fact by some philanthropic
abolitionist, that he was kept shut up in a high upper room of a large
empty house, where even I was not allowed to visit him. I heard at length
of his being in Philadelphia; and upon my distinct statement that I
considered freeing their slaves the business of the Messrs. ----
themselves, and not mine, I was at length permitted to see him. Poor
fellow! coming to the north did not prove to him the delight his eager
desire had so often anticipated from it; nor under such circumstances is
it perhaps much to be wondered at that he benefited but little by the
change,--he died not long after.
I once heard a conversation between Mr. O---- and Mr. K----, the two
overseers of the plantation on which I was living, upon the question of
taking slaves, servants, necessary attendants, into the northern states;
Mr. O---- urged the danger of their being 'got hold of,' i.e., set free
by the abolitionists, to which Mr. K---- very pertinently replied, 'Oh,
stuff and nonsense, I take care when my wife goes north with the children,
to send Lucy with her; _her children are down here, and I defy all the
abolitionists in creation to get her to stay north_.' Mr. K---- was an
extremely wise man.
APPENDIX
I wrote the following letter after reading several leading articles in the
_Times_ newspaper, at the time of the great sensation occasioned by Mrs.
Beecher Stowe's novel of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and after the Anti-Slavery
Protest which that book induced the women of England to address to those
of America, on the subject of the condition of the slaves in the southern
states.
My dear E----. I have read the articles in the _Times_ to which you refer,
on the subject of the inaccuracy of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's book as a picture
of slavery in America, and have ascertained who they were written by.
Having done so, I do not think it worth while to send my letter for
insertion, because, as that is the tone deliberately taken upon the
subject by that paper, my counter statement would not, I imagine, be
admitted into its columns. I enclose it to you, as I should like you to
see how far from true, according to my experience, the statements of the
'_Times'_ Correspondent' are. It is impossible of course to know why it
erects itself into an advocate for slavery; and the most charitable
conjecture I can form upon the subject is, that the Stafford House
demonstration may have been thought likely to wound the sensitive national
views of America upon this subject; and the statement put forward by the
_Times_, contradicting Mrs. Stowe's picture, may be intended to soothe
their irritation at the philanthropic zeal of our lady abolitionists.
Believe me, dear E----,
Yours always truly,
F.A.K.
* * * * *
_Letter to the Editor of the_ 'Times.'
Sir,--As it is not to be supposed that you consciously afford the support
of your great influence to misstatements, I request your attention to some
remarks I wish to make on an article on a book called 'Uncle Tom's Cabin
as it is,' contained in your paper of the 11th. In treating Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe's work as an exaggerated picture of the evils of slavery, I
beg to assure you that you do her serious injustice:--of the merits of her
book as a work of art, I have no desire to speak,--to its power as a most
interesting and pathetic story, all England and America can bear
witness,--but of its truth and moderation as a representation of the
slave system in the United States, I can testify with the experience of
an eye witness, having been a resident in the Southern States, and had
opportunities of observation such as no one who has not lived on a slave
estate can have. It is very true that in reviving the altogether exploded
fashion of making the hero of her novel 'the perfect monster that the
world ne'er saw,' Mrs. Stowe has laid herself open to fair criticism, and
must expect to meet with it from the very opposite taste of the present
day; but the ideal excellence of her principal character is no argument at
all against the general accuracy of her statements with regard to the
evils of slavery;--everything else in her book is not only possible, but
probable, and not only probable, but a very faithful representation of the
existing facts:--faithful, and not, as you accuse it of being,
exaggerated; for, with the exception of the horrible catastrophe, the
flogging to death of poor Tom, she has pourtrayed none of the most
revolting instances of crime produced by the slave system--with which she
might have darkened her picture, without detracting from its perfect
truth. Even with respect to the incident of Tom's death, it must not be
said that if such an event is possible, it is hardly probable; for this is
unfortunately not true. It is not true that the value of the slave as
property infallibly protects his life from the passions of his master. It
is no new thing for a man's passions to blind him to his most obvious and
immediate temporal interests, as well as to his higher and everlasting
ones,--in various parts of the world and stages of civilisation, various
human passions assume successive prominence, and become developed, to the
partial exclusion or deadening of others. In savage existence, and those
states of civilisation least removed from it, the animal passions
predominate. In highly cultivated modern society, where the complicated
machinery of human existence is at once a perpetually renewed cause and
effect of certain legal and moral restraints, which, in the shape of
government and public opinion, protect the congregated lives and interests
of men from the worst outrages of open violence, the natural selfishness
of mankind assumes a different development; and the love of power, of
pleasure, or of pelf, exhibits different phenomena from those elicited
from a savage under the influence of the same passions. The channel in
which the energy and activity of modern society inclines more and more to
pour itself, is the peaceful one of the pursuit of gain. This is
preeminently the case with the two great commercial nations of the earth,
England and America;--and in either England or the Northern States of
America, the prudential and practical views of life prevail so far, that
instances of men sacrificing their money interests at the instigation of
rage, revenge, and hatred, will certainly not abound. But the Southern
slaveholders are a very different race of men from either Manchester
manufacturers or Massachusetts merchants; they are a remnant of barbarism
and feudalism, maintaining itself with infinite difficulty and danger by
the side of the latest and most powerful developement of commercial
civilisation.
The inhabitants of Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New
Orleans, whose estates lie like the suburban retreats of our city magnates
in the near neighbourhood of their respective cities, are not now the
people I refer to. They are softened and enlightened by many
influences,--the action of city life itself, where human sympathy, and
human respect, stimulated by neighbourhood, produce salutary social
restraint, as well as less salutary social cowardice. They travel to the
Northern States, and to Europe; and Europe and the Northern States travel
to them; and in spite of themselves, their peculiar conditions receive
modifications from foreign intercourse. The influence, too, of commercial
enterprise, which, in these latter days, is becoming the agent of
civilisation all over the earth, affects even the uncommercial residents
of the Southern cities, and however cordially they may dislike or despise
the mercantile tendencies of Atlantic Americans, or transatlantic
Englishmen, their frequent contact with them breaks down some of the
barriers of difference between them, and humanises the slaveholder of the
great cities into some relation with the spirit of his own times and
country. But these men are but a most inconsiderable portion of the
slaveholding population of the South,--a nation, for as such they should
be spoken of, of men whose organisation and temperament is that of the
southern European; living under the influence of a climate at once
enervating and exciting; scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid
sand and pestilential swamp; entrenched within their own boundaries;
surrounded by creatures absolutely subject to their despotic will;
delivered over by hard necessity to the lowest excitements of drinking,
gambling, and debauchery for sole recreation; independent of all opinion;
ignorant of all progress; isolated from all society--it is impossible to
conceive a more savage existence within the pale of any modern
civilisation.
The South Carolinan gentry have been fond of styling themselves the
chivalry of the South, and perhaps might not badly represent, in their
relations with their dependents, the nobility of France before the
purifying hurricane of the Revolution swept the rights of the suzerain and
the wrongs of the serf together into one bloody abyss. The planters of the
interior of the Southern and South-Western States, with their furious
feuds and slaughterous combats, their stabbings and pistolings, their
gross sensuality, brutal ignorance, and despotic cruelty, resemble the
chivalry of France before the horrors of the Jacquerie admonished them
that there was a limit even to the endurance of slaves. With such men as
these, human life, even when it can be bought or sold in the market for so
many dollars, is but little protected by considerations of interest from
the effects of any violent passion. There is yet, however, another aspect
of the question, which is, that it is sometimes clearly _not_ the interest
of the owner to prolong the life of his slaves; as in the case of inferior
or superannuated labourers, or the very notorious instance in which some
of the owners of sugar plantations stated that they found it better worth
their while to _work off_ (i.e. kill with labour) a certain proportion, of
their force, and replace them by new hands every seven years, than work
them less severely and maintain them in diminished efficiency for an
indefinite length of time. Here you will observe a precise estimate of the
planter's material interest led to a result which you argue passion itself
can never be so blind as to adopt. This was a deliberate economical
calculation, openly avowed some years ago by a number of sugar planters in
Louisiana. If, instead of accusing Mrs. Stowe of exaggeration, you had
brought the same charge against the author of the 'White Slave,' I should
not have been surprised; for his book presents some of the most revolting
instances of atrocity and crime that the miserable abuse of irresponsible
power is capable of producing, and it is by no means written in the spirit
of universal humanity which pervades Mrs. Stowe's volumes: but it is not
liable to the charge of exaggeration, any more than her less disgusting
delineation. The scenes described in the 'White Slave' _do_ occur in the
slave States of North America; and in two of the most appalling incidents
of the book--the burning alive of the captured runaway, and the hanging
without trial of the Vicksburg gamblers--the author of the 'White Slave'
has very simply related positive facts of notorious occurrence. To which
he might have added, had he seen fit to do so, the instance of a slave who
perished in the sea swamps, where he was left bound and naked, a prey to
the torture inflicted upon him by the venomous mosquito swarms. My
purpose, however, in addressing you was not to enter into a disquisition
on either of these publications; but I am not sorry to take this
opportunity of bearing witness to the truth of Mrs. Stowe's admirable
book, and I have seen what few Englishmen can see--the working of the
system in the midst of it.
In reply to your 'Dispassionate Observer,' who went to the South
professedly with the purpose of seeing and judging of the state of things
for himself, let me tell you that, little as he may be disposed to believe
it, his testimony is worth less than nothing; for it is morally impossible
for any Englishman going into the Southern States, except as a _resident_,
to know anything whatever of the real condition of the slave population.
This was the case some years ago, as I experienced, and it is now likely
to be more the case than ever; for the institution is not _yet_ approved
divine to the perceptions of Englishmen, and the Southerners are as
anxious to hide its uglier features from any note-making observer from
this side the water, as to present to his admiration and approval such as
can by any possibility be made to wear the most distant approach to
comeliness.
The gentry of the Southern States are preeminent in their own country
for that species of manner which, contrasted with the breeding of the
Northerners, would be emphatically pronounced 'good' by Englishmen. Born
to inhabit landed property, they are not inevitably made clerks and
counting-house men of, but inherit with their estates some of the
invariable characteristics of an aristocracy. The shop is not their
element; and the eager spirit of speculation and the sordid spirit of
gain do not infect their whole existence, even to their very demeanour
and appearance, as they too manifestly do those of a large proportion of
the inhabitants of the Northern States. Good manners have an undue value
for Englishmen, generally speaking; and whatever departs from their
peculiar standard of breeding is apt to prejudice them, as whatever
approaches it prepossesses them, far more than is reasonable. The
Southerners are infinitely better bred men, according to English
notions, than the men of the Northern States. The habit of command gives
them a certain self-possession, the enjoyment of leisure a certain ease.
Their temperament is impulsive and enthusiastic, and their manners have
the grace and spirit which seldom belong to the deportment of a Northern
people; but upon more familiar acquaintance, the vices of the social
system to which they belong will be found to have infected them with
their own peculiar taint; and haughty overbearing irritability,
effeminate indolence, reckless extravagance, and a union of profligacy
and cruelty, which is the immediate result of their irresponsible power
over their dependents, are some of the less pleasing traits which
acquaintance developes in a Southern character. In spite of all this,
there is no manner of doubt that the 'candid English observer' will, for
the season of his sojourning among them, greatly prefer their
intercourse to that of their Northern brethren. Moreover, without in the
least suspecting it, he will be bribed insidiously and incessantly by
the extreme desire and endeavour to please and prepossess him which the
whole white population of the slave States will exhibit--as long as he
goes only as a 'candid observer,' with a mind not _yet_ made up upon the
subject of slavery, and open to conviction as to its virtues. Every
conciliating demonstration of courtesy and hospitable kindness will be
extended to him, and, as I said before, if his observation is permitted
(and it may even appear to be courted), it will be to a fairly bound
purified edition of the black book of slavery, in which, though the
inherent viciousness of the whole story cannot be suppressed, the
coarser and more offensive passages will be carefully expunged. And now,
permit me to observe, that the remarks of your traveller must derive
much of their value from the scene of his enquiry. In Maryland,
Kentucky, and Virginia, the outward aspect of slavery has ceased to wear
its most deplorable features. The remaining vitality of the system no
longer resides in the interests, but in the pride and prejudices of the
planters. Their soil and climate are alike favourable to the labours of
a white peasantry: the slave cultivation has had time to prove itself
there the destructive pest which, in time, it will prove itself wherever
it prevails. The vast estates and large fortunes that once maintained,
and were maintained by, the serfdom of hundreds of negroes, have
dwindled in size and sunk in value, till the slaves have become so heavy
a burthen on the resources of the exhausted soil and impoverished owners
of it, that they are made themselves objects of traffic in order to ward
off the ruin that their increase would otherwise entail. Thus, the
plantations of the Northern slave States now present to the traveller
very few of the darker and more oppressive peculiarities of the system;
and, provided he does not stray too near the precincts where the negroes
are sold, or come across gangs of them on their way to Georgia,
Louisiana, or Alabama, he may, if he is a very superficial observer,
conclude that the most prosperous slavery is not much worse than the
most miserable freedom.
But of what value will be such conclusions applied to those numerous
plantations where no white man ever sets foot without the express
permission of the owner? not estates lying close to Baltimore and
Charleston, or even Lesington or Savannah, but remote and savage
wildernesses like Legree's estate in 'Uncle Tom,' like all the plantations
in the interior of Tennessee and Alabama, like the cotton-fields and
rice-swamps of the great muddy rivers of Lousiana and Georgia, like the
dreary pine barrens and endless woody wastes of north Carolina. These,
especially the islands, are like so many fortresses, approachable for
'observers' only at the owners' will. On most of the rice plantations in
these pestilential regions, no white man can pass the night at certain
seasons of the year without running the risk of his life; and during the
day, the master and overseer are as much alone and irresponsible in their
dominion over their black cattle, as Robinson Crusoe was over his small
family of animals on his desert habitation. Who, on such estates as these,
shall witness to any act of tyranny or barbarity, however atrocious? No
black man's testimony is allowed against a white, and who on the dismal
swampy rice-grounds of the Savannah, or the sugar-brakes of the
Mississippi and its tributaries, or the up country cotton lands of the
Ocamulgee, shall go to perform the task of candid observation and
benevolent enquiry?
I passed some time on two such estates--plantations where the negroes
esteemed themselves well off, and, compared with the slaves on several of
the neighbouring properties, might very well consider themselves so; and
I will, with your permission, contrast some of the items of my observation
with those of the traveller whose report you find so satisfactory on the
subject of the 'consolations' of slavery.
And first, for the attachment which he affirms to subsist between the
slave and master. I do not deny that certain manifestations on the part of
the slave may suggest the idea of such a feeling; but whether upon better
examination it will be found to deserve the name, I very much doubt. In
the first place, on some of the great Southern estates, the owners are
habitual absentees, utterly unknown to their serfs, and enjoying the
proceeds of their labour in residences as remote as possible from the
sands and swamps where their rice and cotton grow, and their slaves bow
themselves under the eye of the white overseer, and the lash of the black
driver. Some of these Sybarites prefer living in Paris, that paradise of
American republicans, some in the capitals of the middle states of the
union, Philadelphia or New York.
The air of New England has a keen edge of liberty, which suits few
Southern constitutions; and unkindly as abolition has found its native
soil and native skies, that is its birthplace, and there it flourishes, in
spite of all attempts to root it out and trample it down, and within any
atmosphere poisoned by its influence no slaveholder can willingly draw
breath. Some travel in Europe, and few, whose means permit the contrary,
ever pass the entire year on their plantations. Great intervals of many
years pass, and no master ever visits some of these properties: what
species of attachment do you think the slave entertains for him? In other
cases, the visits made will be of a few days in one of the winter months;
the estate and its cultivators remaining for the rest of the year under
the absolute control of the overseer, who, provided he contrives to get a
good crop of rice or cotton into the market for his employers, is left to
the arbitrary exercise of a will seldom uninfluenced for evil, by the
combined effects of the grossest ignorance and habitual intemperance. The
temptation to the latter vice is almost irresistible to a white man in
such a climate, and leading an existence of brutal isolation, among a
parcel of human beings as like brutes as they can be made. But the owner
who at these distant intervals of months or years revisits his estates, is
looked upon as a returning providence by the poor negroes. They have no
experience of his character to destroy their hopes in his goodness, and
all possible and impossible ameliorations of their condition are
anticipated from his advent, less work, more food, fewer stripes, and some
of that consideration which the slave hopes may spring from his positive
money value to his owner,--a fallacious dependence, as I have already
attempted to show, but one which, if it has not always predominating
weight with the master, never can have any with the overseer, who has not
even the feeling of regard for his own property to mitigate his
absolutism over the slaves of another man.
There is a very powerful cause which makes the prosperity and well-being
(as far as life is concerned) of most masters a subject of solicitude with
their slaves. The only stability of their condition, such as it is, hangs
upon it. If the owner of a plantation dies, his estates may fall into the
market, and his slaves be sold at public auction the next day; and whether
this promises a better, or threatens a worse condition, the slaves cannot
know, and no human being cares. One thing it inevitably brings, the
uprooting of all old associations; the disruption of all the ties of
fellowship in misery; the tearing asunder of all relations of blood and
affection; the sale into separate and far distant districts of fathers,
mothers, husbands, wives, and children. If the estate does not lie in the
extreme south, there is the vague dread of being driven thither from
Virginia to Georgia, from Carolina to Alabama, or Louisiana, a change
which, for reasons I have shown above, implies the passing from a higher
into a lower circle of the infernal pit of slavery.
I once heard a slave on the plantation of an absentee express the most
lively distress at hearing that his master was ill. Before, however, I had
recovered from my surprise at this warm 'attachment' to a distant and all
but unknown proprietor, the man added, 'massa die, what become of all him
people?'