most extravagant demonstrations of delight, and all but lifted off my feet
in the arms of people who had never seen me before; but who, knowing me to
be connected with their owners, expected from me some of the multitudinous
benefits which they always hope to derive from masters. These, until they
come to reside among them, are always believed to be sources of
beneficence and fountains of redress by the poor people, who have known no
rule but the delegated tyranny of the overseer. In these expectations,
however, they very soon find themselves cruelly mistaken. Of course, if
the absentee planter has received a satisfactory income from his estate,
he is inclined to be satisfied with the manager of it, and as
subordination to the only white man among hundreds of blacks must be
maintained at any and every cost, the overseer is justified and upheld in
his whole administration. If the wretched slave ever dared to prefer a
complaint of ill-usage the most atrocious, the law which refuses the
testimony of a black against a white is not only the law of the land, but
of every man's private dealings; and lying being one of the natural
results of slavery, and a tendency to shirk compelled and unrequited
labour another, the overseer stands on excellent vantage-ground, when he
refers to these undoubted characteristics of the system, if called upon to
rebut any charge of cruelty or injustice. But pray consider for a moment
the probability of any such charge being preferred by a poor creature,
who has been for years left to the absolute disposal of this man, and who
knows very well that in a few days, or months at furthest, the master will
again depart, leaving him again for months, perhaps for years, utterly at
the mercy of the man against whom he has dared to prefer a complaint. On
the estates which I visited, the owners had been habitually absent, and
the 'attachment' of slaves to such masters as these, you will allow, can
hardly come under the denomination of a strong personal feeling.
Your authority next states that the infirm and superannuated slaves no
longer capable of ministering to their masters' luxuries, on the estate
that he visited, were ending their lives among all the comforts of home,
with kindred and friends around them, in a condition which he contrasts,
at least by implication, very favourably with the workhouse, the last
refuge provided by the social humanity of England--for the pauper labourer
when he has reached that term when 'unregarded age is in corners thrown.'
On the plantation where I lived the infirmary was a large room, the walls
of which were simply mud and lathes--the floor, the soil itself, damp with
perpetual drippings from the holes in the roof, and the open space which
served for a window was protected only by a broken shutter, which, in
order to exclude the cold, was drawn so near as almost to exclude the
light at the same time. Upon this earthen floor, with nothing but its
hard damp surface beneath him, no covering but a tattered shirt and
trowsers, and a few sticks under his head for a pillow, lay an old man of
upwards of seventy, dying. When I first looked at him I thought by the
glazed stare of his eyes, and the flies that had gathered round his half
open mouth, that he was dead: but on stooping nearer, I perceived that the
last faint struggle of life was still going on, but even while I bent over
him it ceased; and so, like a worn-out hound, with no creature to comfort
or relieve his last agony, with neither Christian solace or human succour
near him, with neither wife, nor child, nor even friendly fellow being to
lift his head from the knotty sticks on which he had rested it, or drive
away the insects that buzzed round his lips and nostrils like those of a
fallen beast, died this poor old slave, whose life had been exhausted in
unrequited labour, the fruits of which had gone to pamper the pride and
feed the luxury of those who knew and cared neither for his life or death,
and to whom, if they had heard of the latter, it would have been a matter
of absolute though small gain, the saving of a daily pittance of meal,
which served to prolong a life no longer available to them.
I proceed to the next item in your observer's record. All children below
the age of twelve were unemployed, he says, on the estate he visited: this
is perhaps a questionable benefit, when, no process of mental cultivation
being permitted, the only employment for the leisure thus allowed is that
of rolling, like dogs or cats, in the sand and the sun. On all the
plantations I visited, and on those where I resided, the infants in arms
were committed to the care of these juvenile slaves, who were denominated
nurses, and whose sole employment was what they call to 'mind baby.' The
poor little negro sucklings were cared for (I leave to your own judgement
how efficiently or how tenderly) by these half-savage slips of
slavery--carried by them to the fields where their mothers were working
under the lash, to receive their needful nourishment, and then carried
back again to the 'settlement,' or collection of negro huts, where they
wallowed unheeded in utter filth and neglect until the time again returned
for their being carried to their mother's breast. Such was the employment
of the children of eight or nine years old, and the only supervision
exercised over either babies or 'baby minders' was that of the old woman
left in charge of the infirmary, where she made her abode all day long and
bestowed such samples of her care and skill upon its inmates as I shall
have occasion to mention presently. The practice of thus driving the
mothers a-field, even while their infants were still dependent upon them
for their daily nourishment, is one of which the evil as well as the
cruelty is abundantly apparent without comment. The next note of
admiration elicited from your 'impartial observer' is bestowed upon the
fact that the domestic servants (i.e. house slaves) on the plantation he
visited were _allowed_ to live away from the owner's residence, and to
marry. But I never was on a southern plantation, and I never heard of one,
where any of the slaves were allowed to sleep under the same roof with
their owner. With the exception of the women to whose care the children of
the planter, if he had any, might be confided, and perhaps a little boy or
girl slave, kept as a sort of pet animal and allowed to pass the night on
the floor of the sleeping apartment of some member of the family, the
residence of _any_ slaves belonging to a plantation night and day in their
master's house, like Northern or European servants, is a thing I believe
unknown throughout the Southern States. Of course I except the cities, and
speak only of the estates, where the house servants are neither better
housed or accommodated than the field-hands. Their intolerably dirty
habits and offensive persons would indeed render it a severe trial to any
family accustomed to habits of decent cleanliness; and, moreover,
considerations of safety, and that cautious vigilance which is a hard
necessity of the planter's existence, in spite of the supposed attachment
of his slaves, would never permit the near proximity, during the
unprotected hours of the night, of those whose intimacy with the daily
habits and knowledge of the nightly securities resorted to might prove
terrible auxiliaries to any attack from without. The city guards, patrols,
and night-watches, together with their stringent rules about negroes
being abroad after night, and their well fortified lock-up houses for all
detected without a pass, afford some security against these attached
dependents; but on remote plantations, where the owner and his family and
perhaps a white overseer are alone, surrounded by slaves and separated
from all succour against them, they do not sleep under the white man's
roof, and, for politic reasons, pass the night away from their master's
abode. The house servants have no other or better allowance of food than
the field labourers, but have the advantage of eking it out by what is
left from the master's table,--if possible, with even less comfort in one
respect, inasmuch as no time whatever is set apart for their meals, which
they snatch at any hour and in any way that they can--generally, however,
standing or squatting on their hams round the kitchen fire; the kitchen
being a mere outhouse or barn with a fire in it. On the estate where I
lived, as I have mentioned, they had no sleeping-rooms in the house; but
when their work was over, they retired like the rest to their hovels, the
discomfort of which had to them all the additional disadvantage of
comparison with their owner's mode of living. In all establishments
whatever, of course some disparity exists between the accommodation of the
drawing-rooms and best bed-rooms and the servants' kitchen and attics; but
on a plantation it is no longer a matter of degree. The young women who
performed the offices of waiting and housemaids, and the lads who
attended upon the service of their master's table where I lived, had
neither table to feed at nor chair to sit down upon themselves; the 'boys'
lay all night on the hearth by the kitchen fire, and the women upon the
usual slave's bed--a frame of rough boards, strewed with a little moss off
the trees, with the addition perhaps of a tattered and filthy blanket. As
for the so-called privilege of marrying--surely it is gross mockery to
apply such a word to a bond which may be holy in God's sight, but which
did not prevent the owner of a plantation where my observations were made
from selling and buying men and their so-called wives and children into
divided bondage, nor the white overseer from compelling the wife of one of
the most excellent and exemplary of his master's slaves to live with
him--nor the white wife of another overseer, in her husband's temporary
absence from the estate, from barbarously flogging three _married_ slaves
within a month of their confinement, their condition being the result of
the profligacy of the said overseer, and probably compelled by the very
same lash by which it was punished. This is a very disgusting picture of
married life on slave estates: but I have undertaken to reply to the
statements of your informant, and I regret to be obliged to record the
facts by which alone I can do so. 'Work,' continues your authority, 'began
at six in the morning, at nine an hour's rest was allowed for breakfast,
and by two or three o'clock the day's work was done.' Certainly this was a
pattern plantation, and I can only lament that my experience lay amid such
far less favourable circumstances. The negroes among whom I lived went to
the fields at daybreak, carrying with them their allowance of food, which
toward noon, and not till then, they ate, cooking it over a fire which
they kindled as best they could where they were working; their _second_
meal in the day was at night after their labour was over, having worked at
the _very least_ six hours without rest or refreshment, since their
noon-day meal--properly so called, indeed, for it was meal and nothing
else, or a preparation something thicker than porridge, which they call
hominy. Perhaps the candid observer, whose report of the estate he visited
appeared to you so consolatory, would think that this diet contrasted
favourably with that of potato and butter-milk fed Irish labourers. But a
more just comparison surely would be with the mode of living of the
labouring population of the United States, the peasantry of Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, or indeed with the condition of those
very potato and butter-milk fed Irishmen when they have exchanged their
native soil for the fields of the Northern and North-Western States, and
when, as one of them once was heard to say, it was no use writing home
that he got meat three times a-day, for nobody in Ireland would believe
it. The next item in the list of commendation is the hospital, which your
informant also visited, and of which he gives the following account--'It
consisted of three separate wards, all clean and well ventilated: one was
for lying-in women, who were invariably allowed a month's rest after their
confinement.' Permit me to place beside this picture that of a Southern
infirmary, such as I saw it, and taken on the spot. In the first room that
I entered I found only half of the windows, of which there were six,
glazed; these were almost as much obscured with dirt as the other
windowless ones were darkened by the dingy shutters which the shivering
inmates had closed in order to protect themselves from the cold. In the
enormous chimney glimmered the powerless embers of a few chips of wood,
round which as many of the sick women as had strength to approach were
cowering, some on wooden settles (there was not such a thing as a chair
with a back in the whole establishment), most of them on the ground,
excluding those who were too ill to rise--and these poor wretches lay
prostrate on the earth, without bedstead, bed, mattress, or pillow, with
no covering but the clothes they had on and some filthy rags of blanket in
which they endeavoured to wrap themselves as they lay literally strewing
the floor, so that there was hardly room to pass between them. Here in
their hour of sickness and suffering lay those whose health and strength
had given way under unrequited labour--some of them, no later than the
previous day, had been urged with the lash to their accustomed tasks--and
their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons were even at that hour
sweating over the earth whose increase was to procure for others all the
luxuries which health can enjoy, all the comforts which can alleviate
sickness. Here lay women expecting every hour the terror and agonies of
child-birth, others who had just brought their doomed offspring into the
world, others who were groaning over the anguish and bitter disappointment
of miscarriages--here lay some burning with fever, others chilled with
cold and aching with rheumatism, upon the hard cold ground, the draughts
and damp of the atmosphere increasing their sufferings, and dirt, noise,
stench, and every aggravation of which sickness is capable combined in
their condition. There had been among them one or two cases of prolonged
and terribly hard labour; and the method adopted by the ignorant old
negress, who was the sole matron, midwife, nurse, physician, surgeon, and
servant of the infirmary, to assist them in their extremity, was to tie a
cloth tight round the throats of the agonised women, and by drawing it
till she almost suffocated them she produced violent and spasmodic
struggles, which she assured me she thought materially assisted the
progress of the labour. This was one of the Southern infirmaries with
which I was acquainted; and I beg to conclude this chapter of contrasts to
your informant's consolatory views of slavery, by assuring you once more
very emphatically that they have been one and all drawn from estates
where the slaves esteemed themselves well treated, were reputed generally
to be so, and undoubtedly, as far as my observation went, were so,
compared with those on several of the adjoining plantations.
With regard to the statement respecting the sums of money earned by
industrious negroes, there is no doubt that it is perfectly correct. I
knew of some slaves on a plantation in the extreme South who had received,
at various times, large sums of money from a shopkeeper in the small town
near their estate, for the grey moss or lichen collected from the
evergreen oaks of Carolina and Georgia, upon which it hangs in vast
masses, and after some cleaning process becomes an excellent substitute
for horse-hair, for bed, chair, and sofa-stuffing. On another estate, some
of the slaves were expert boat makers, and had been allowed by their
masters to retain the price (no inconsiderable one) for some that they had
found time to manufacture after their day's labour was accomplished. These
were undoubtedly privileges, but I confess it appears to me that the
juster view of the matter would be this--if these men were industrious
enough out of their scanty leisure to earn these sums of money, which a
mere exercise of arbitrary will on the part of the master allowed them to
keep, how much more of remuneration, of comfort, of improvement, physical
and mental, might they not have achieved, had the due price of their daily
labour merely been paid to them? It seems to me that this is the mode of
putting the case to Englishmen, and all who have not agreed to consider
uncertain favour an equivalent for common justice in the dealings of man
with man. As the slaves are well known to toil for years sometimes to
amass the means of rescuing themselves from bondage, the fact of their
being able and sometimes allowed to earn considerable sums of money is
notorious. But now that I have answered one by one the instances you have
produced, with others--I am sure as accurate and I believe as common--of
an entirely opposite description, permit me to ask you what this sort of
testimony amounts to. I allow you full credit for yours, allow me full
credit for mine, and the result is very simply a nullification of the one
by the other statement, and a proof that there is as much good as evil in
the details of slavery; but now, be pleased to throw into the scale this
consideration, that the principle of the whole is unmitigated abominable
evil, as by your own acknowledgement you hold it to be, and add, moreover,
that the principle being invariably bad beyond the power of the best man
acting under it to alter its execrable injustice, the goodness of the
detail is a matter absolutely dependent upon the will of each individual
slaveholder, so that though the best cannot make the system in the
smallest particular better, the bad can make every practical detail of it
as atrocious as the principle itself; and then tell me upon what ground
you palliate a monstrous iniquity, which is the rule, because of the
accidental exceptions which go to prove it. Moreover, if, as you have
asserted, good preponderates over evil in the practice, though not in the
theory of slavery, or it would not maintain its existence, why do you
uphold to us, with so much complacency, the hope that it is surely if not
rapidly approaching its abolishment? Why is the preponderating good, which
has, as you say, proved sufficient to uphold the institution hitherto, to
become (in spite of the spread of civilisation and national progress, and
the gradual improvement of the slaves themselves) inadequate to its
perpetuation henceforward? Or why, if good really has prevailed in it, do
you rejoice that it is speedily to pass away? You say the emancipation of
the slaves is inevitable, and that through progressive culture the negro
of the Southern States daily approaches more nearly to the recovery of the
rights of which he has been robbed. But whence do you draw this happy
augury, except from the hope, which all Christian souls must cherish, that
God will not permit much longer so great a wickedness to darken the face
of the earth? Surely the increased stringency of the Southern slave-laws,
the more than ever vigilant precautions against all attempts to enlighten
or educate the negroes, the severer restrictions on manumission, the
thrusting forth out of certain States of all free persons of colour, the
atrocious Fugitive Slave Bill, one of the latest achievements of
Congress, and the piratical attempts upon Cuba, avowedly on the part of
all Southerners, abetting or justifying it because it will add
slave-territory and 600,000 slaves to their possessions;--surely these do
not seem indications of the better state of things you anticipate, except,
indeed, as the straining of the chain beyond all endurable tightness
significantly suggests the probability of its giving way.
I do not believe the planters have any disposition to put an end to
slavery, nor is it perhaps much to be wondered at that they have not. To
do so is, in the opinion of the majority of them, to run the risk of
losing their property, perhaps their lives, for a benefit which they
profess to think doubtful to the slaves themselves. How far they are right
in anticipating ruin from the manumission of their slaves I think
questionable, but that they do so is certain, and self-impoverishment for
the sake of abstract principle is not a thing to be reasonably expected
from any large mass of men. But, besides the natural fact that the
slaveholders wish to retain their property, emancipation is, in their view
of it, not only a risk of enormous pecuniary loss, and of their entire
social status, but involves elements of personal danger, and above all,
disgust to inveterate prejudices, which they will assuredly never
encounter. The question is not alone one of foregoing great wealth, or the
mere means of subsistence (in either case almost equally hard); it is not
alone the unbinding the hands of those who have many a bloody debt of
hatred and revenge to settle; it is not alone the consenting suddenly to
see by their side, upon a footing of free social equality, creatures
towards whom their predominant feeling is one of mingled terror and
abhorrence, and who, during the whole of their national existence, have
been, as the earth, trampled beneath their feet, yet ever threatening to
gape and swallow them alive. It is not all this alone which makes it
unlikely that the Southern planter should desire to free his slaves:
freedom in America is not merely a personal right, it involves a political
privilege. Freemen there are legislators. The rulers of the land are the
majority of the people, and in many parts of the Southern States the black
free citizens would become, if not at once, yet in process of time,
inevitably voters, landholders, delegates to state legislatures, members
of assembly--who knows?--senators, judges, aspirants to the presidency of
the United States. You must be an American, or have lived long among them,
to conceive the shout of derisive execration with which such an idea would
be hailed from one end of the land to the other.
That the emancipation of the negroes need not necessarily put them in
possession of the franchise is of course obvious, but as a general
consequence the one would follow from the other; and at present certainly
the slaveholders are no more ready to grant the political privilege than
the natural right of freedom. Under these circumstances, though the utmost
commiseration is naturally excited by the slaves, I agree with you that
some forbearance is due to the masters. It is difficult to conceive a more
awful position than theirs: fettered by laws which impede every movement
towards right and justice, and utterly without the desire to repeal
them--dogged by the apprehension of nameless retributions--bound beneath a
burthen of responsibility for which, whether they acknowledge it or not,
they are held accountable by God and men--goaded by the keen consciousness
of the growing reprobation of all civilised Christian communities, their
existence presents the miserable moral counterpart of the physical
condition of their slaves; and it is one compared with which that of the
wretchedest slave is, in my judgement, worthy of envy.
* * * * *
_Letter to C.G., Esq._
Before entering upon my answer to your questions, let me state that I have
no claim to be ranked as an abolitionist in the American acceptation of
the word, for I have hitherto held the emancipation of the slaves to be
exclusively the business and duty of their owners, whose highest moral
interest I thought it was to rid themselves of such a responsibility, in
spite of the manifold worldly interests almost inextricably bound up with
it.
This has been my feeling hitherto with regard to the views of the
abolitionists, which I now, however, heartily embrace, inasmuch as I think
that from the moment the United States Government assumed an attitude of
coercion and supremacy towards the Southern States, it was bound with its
fleets and armies to introduce its polity with respect to slavery, and
wherever it planted the standard of the Union to proclaim the universal
freedom which is the recognised law of the Northern United States. That
they have not done so has been partly owing to a superstitious, but
honourable veneration for the letter of their great charter, the
constitution, and still more to the hope they have never ceased to
entertain of bringing back the South to its allegiance under the former
conditions of the Union, an event which will be rendered impossible by any
attempt to interfere with the existence of slavery.