Southerners often represent the condition of their slaves to be so happy and desirable that we might wonder that they do not sometimes take measures to be made slaves themselves, or at least occasionally offer their children for sale to the highest bidder. Yet there are many among us who always assume these accounts to be the only reliable information that we have upon the subject. On the other hand, there [are] many who always picture the slave as a martyr, with his hands folded in supplication, naked, faint with hunger, dragging a chain, and constantly driven to extremity of human exertion by a monster flourishing a cart-whip.

A Scotchman, who had been employed at home as foreman of a large stock farm, came, a year or two since, to America, to better his condition. He spent some months in Canada and afterwards in New-England, looking in vain for a situation suited to his capabilities and habits. His little capital being nearly expended, he used what remained in paying his passage to Richmond, Va., learning that the proprietors of farms in the Slave States generally employed overseers, as in Scotland. On arriving at Richmond he immediately walked into the country, and at nightfall came to the plantation of the gentleman who related his story to me. He informed the proprietor of his circumstances and solicited employment, presenting, at the same time, a recommendation from his last employer in Scotland, and a testimonial of his piety, good character and education from the pastor of the church he had belonged to in the old country. Before, however, the gentleman had read these, he said to him, “By the way, Sir, there are a number of your niggers loose in the lane.”

“What?”

“As I was coming up the lane to the house, Sir, I met a number of niggers just going off loose, without anybody to look after them.”

“Yes, I suppose they have got through their work, and are going to their quarters.”

[248]

“But they were loose, Sir; just straying off, nobody looking after them. If you wish, Sir, I’ll run down and catch them.”

The Scotchman had always been informed, as he afterwards told the gentleman, that the slaves were treated exactly like cattle, and probably would not have been much surprised if he had been ordered to put half a dozen of them into stalls to be fattened for the butcher.

I think that anyone who has read the accounts I have given of the negroes upon the different plantations I have visited, and the chance-observations I have made on others, will have obtained a correct and reliable idea of the customary manner in which the slaves are treated by the whites. It may be desired of me, however, to give the conclusions at which I have arrived upon certain points which have been most fruitful of unprofitable controversy.

Are the slaves hard-worked, poorly fed, miserably lodged and clothed, and subject to frequent brutal punishment?

Any sensible man, at all familiar with the Black-laws of the Southern States, can anticipate the true answer to these questions from his general knowledge of human nature. There is all the difference in the treatment of slaves by different masters that there is of horses by their riders, or of children by their parents. The laws have very little power to restrain cruelty or to enforce care and provide adequate sustenance for the negroes. They have less effect than the laws to secure humane treatment of animals at the North, because the violations of the laws at the South would be much more seldom witnessed by persons anxious to secure their enforcement, and because Southerners respect the individuality of each other more than Northerners, and are more loth to meddle in matters that do not especially concern themselves. Public Opinion is favorable to humanity and care—in some districts very strongly and effectually so. In general its influence is not very valuable to the negro, for the same reasons that the laws are not. What power has Public Opinion on the treatment of domestics and farm laborers at the North? Except in extreme cases, none. Competition is the balance wheel of cupidity.

But as I have said, in describing the character of the people of the South, they are as kind to their slaves as any people could be imagined to be—much more kind than one whose whole experience of human nature had been obtained at the Northern States would be likely to imagine them to be.

If the labor of the slaves were voluntary—if he were exhilarated with the spirit of the ambitious free laborer, with a loved wife and children to enjoy the fruits of his toil in proportion to its amount, his work would in nearly every case, as far as I could judge, be light. As it is, on the far Southern large plantations especially, it seemed to me that the negro was driven at his work more tediously and fatiguingly than agricultural laborers often are in any other part of the world that I have visited.

The negroes, I should think, were generally abundantly provided with coarse food—more so than the agricultural laborers of any part of Europe.

They are sufficiently clothed, in general, to enable them, if they are at [249] all pains-taking, which they seldom are in this particular, to appear decently, and to protect them from any degree of cold weather to which in the mild climate of the South they are subject. Their habitations are generally very deficient in comfort, and are much too small for the number of occupants that are crowded into them. Rapid improvement in this respect, however, is now making; neat (exteriorly) quarters for the negroes having become a fashionable part of every gentleman’s plantation. The negroes seldom or never want for fuel.

There are but few plantations in which the negroes are not frequently punished by being whipped, and that not seldom with what I should think would be generally considered at the North, severity. In this respect I think the condition of the negroes is just about what that of the seamen has formerly been in our Navy, and still is in the English service, varying on different plantations as in different ships. Cases of disgusting cruelty are not very rare. I never asked a middle aged Southerner the question (and I put it perhaps twenty times) who was not able to tell me a case within his own knowledge, and occurring, probably, in the near vicinity of his residence, of a slave killed by severe punishment from its master. I do not believe slaves are killed by their masters one tenth as often as sailors are by the cruelty or carelessness of their masters. I believe very few overseers punish their slaves entrusted to them so wantonly, brutally, passionately and cruelly as I have seen a clergyman in New-England punish boys entrusted to him for education. On some few plantations punishment of adult and well-broken negroes is very rare. But it requires a man of peculiar temperament and governing abilities, to efficiently control and direct a large body of persons, dependent on him and subject to his uncontrolled authority, whether they are negroes or sailors, or peasants or children, without the use of the lash or other humiliating punishments.

Are the slaves “happy?”

Anyone who thinks that a drunkard can be made happy by supplying him to his full content with the only thing in the world that he craves, might answer this question as it generally is answered by Southern writers and their Northern disciples. And, in this sense, I believe it is true that the negro in Southern slavery is sufficiently degraded to be as happy on an average, as most men are in the world; as happy (in this sense) as the majority of the negroes who enjoy the freedom to live, if they can, in contempt and obloquy at the North.

Are the slaves often separated against their will from their families?

It is astonishing that anyone can be so careless as to deny it. In every State of the South, except Florida, Missouri, Delaware, and in Texas, which I have not yet visited, I have known of slaves separated from their families without the slighest indication that it was not a frequent and almost an everyday occurrence. I can show evidence that would satisfy any court that it is a common practice in every Slave State. If anyone says that they have never known such a case in their own neighborhood, as our Southern friends often do, and, no doubt, believing that they speak truly, the chances are that if you ask them to let you look at the newspaper published nearest their residence, you [250] will find an advertisement in it of slaves, in which some half dozen will be noted as the children of another, all to be sold singly and with no more restriction as to their future fate than if they were cattle, and at public auction. In a paper now before me there are nine mentioned as of one family, to be sold separately, but the suckling infants of two of them, and the child aged 3 years, and infant aged two months, of a girl aged 19, are to be sold with their mothers. Public opinion is opposed to the sale of old family servants, yet they not unfrequently are sold. I have several friends at the South who have each purchased more than one such, from mere humanity, to save them from being “sold away”—that is, from being separated from their wives and children. It is not a very common thing to sell a slave except “for fault,” unless the owner has especial need of money. But this reason for selling a servant will be held over him as a threat, at every trifling occasion for blaming him. It is not common in most communities to sell a single slave, particularly if he is married, without mentioning the intention to do so, to him some time previously, and giving him leave to look about to find some person that he will like for a master, to purchase him. A price is often mentioned at which he is warned to sell himself, or after a certain time he will be sold to the traders. At almost every slave auction, however, the anxiety of the negroes to be purchased by some person living near their old master and their families, and their grief, if they are disappointed, is painfully evident.

The trade of a slave-dealer is about as reputable at the South as that of a horse jockey is at the North. They are generally considered knaves, and I think therefore are not admitted into the society of honorable gentlemen. To say that they are not so, merely because they buy and sell human flesh, is thoughtless, because there are very few of the honorable gentlemen of the South that have not themselves either bought or sold servants.

I have heard respectable planters speak of their friends as having borrowed money to speculate in negroes. “Negroes are the consols of the South,” is a proverbial expression with Southerners—certainly indicating the frequent and general transfer of this species of stock. Virginians who visit the North, often angrily deny that anyone in that State makes a business of breeding negroes for market. Perhaps not, but I have heard men in Virginia speak publicly of purchasing women with reference to their breeding qualities, and of taking the most suitable care of them for this end. Men speak in railroad cars of “turning off” so many negroes every year, precisely as a Connecticut farmer speaks of “turning off” so many head of neat stock to the drovers every Spring.

A gentleman whom I visited in Mississippi, to show me that the condition of the negroes in that State was much more desirable than that of those in the Atlantic Slave States—after enumerating certain luxuries and privileges that were generally allowed them there, such as an allowance of molasses and better variety of food generally, a perquisite of money in proportion to the cotton sold, and permission to cultivate cotton, for sale themselves, [251] on Saturday afternoons and holidays—added that the negroes were very much less frequently sold off the plantation and separated from their friends.

“A cotton planter here,” he said, “buys all the negroes his credit is good for, and keeps all he can get. Why, in Virginia, if a youngster wants to get a fine horse, or a young lady wants a piano, they teaze their father to sell one of the young negroes to get the money for it; a negro is reckoned just the same as cash.” It is undeniable that the human life, sold and exported every year from Virginia, far exceeds in value that of the total of all other of its productions. It is always gratifying to find Virginians ashamed of this, as the cultivated gentlemen and the religious people generally are. The sale and purchase of men, women and children, regarding them so distinctly as property, and property entirely, is such an insult to the human race, that nothing else that disgraces the name of man more demands the shame and the indignant protest of all men who claim to be gentlemen of honor and chivalry.

Are the negroes in Slavery improving and being christianized and becoming fitted gradually for freedom, as was anticipated and expected by the founders of the Republic, both of the North and South, at the time of the Revolution?

Beyond a doubt, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, and who formed the Constitution of the United States (to judge from the expressions which the most prominent among them are recorded to have made), would be exceedingly disappointed with the present state of things. Not less so would be the men who composed various provincial Conventions in Virginia and North Carolina. Most disappointed would be Jefferson, who even at that early day pronounced in the gravest and most formal manner, in his history of Virginia, that Slavery was a great and dreadful curse upon his native State, the speedy end of which was to be demanded by every consideration of Justice, Humanity and Expediency.

The condition of the slaves is doubtless improving, and has greatly improved since the Revolution, in all the long settled parts of the country, in respect to the kindness with which they are treated. I mean that they are better fed, clothed and lodged, and are less subject to brutal punishment. The present tendency in the Cotton States to the enlargement of plantations, and to gathering negroes in larger bodies, I deem exceedingly unfavorable to their happiness.

The negroes are necessarily acquiring more of the outward forms and habits of civilization and Christianity every day, and many of those engaged in the domestic service of white households, and those living in towns, and the denser and more commercial communities, are growing intelligent, religious and moral. I must doubt if this is the case with the mass. I think they lose as much that is desirable of their original savage virtue from the influence of Slavery, as they gain in character from the influence of Christianity. Manliness, reliability, natural sense of and respect for that which is noble, self-respect and responsibility to conscience, and the natural affections, are all dissipated under the influence of Slavery, and are poorly compensated for by the mixture of formalism and irrational, idolatrous mysticisms, which generally [252] passes with them for Christianity. I am aware that the opinion of most of the religious people of the South does not agree with that which I have been led to form. That of the majority of slaveholders and of all classes, however, so far as I could judge, does so.

There are very, very few Southerners who are not determinedly opposed to the indefinite improvement and elevation of the negroes. If this is doubted, ask any Southerner what is his private opinion with regard to the destiny in the future of the Gulf States, and ten to one, if his answer is made freely and candidly, he will be obliged to admit that his view is incompatible with any great degree of intelligence on the part of the negroes. It is the general belief that in the great cotton, sugar and rice districts, Slavery will, and should, be indefinitely perpetuated. Ignorance and indolence of mind, and want of ambition, energy and intellectual capacity to struggle for freedom, are rightly considered necessary to Slavery.

With regard to the instruction of Slaves, it is well known that in the majority of the States it is forbidden by law to teach them to read and write. Nevertheless, with women and children, higher law notions seem to prevail, and it is not uncommon to find that some of the domestic servants of a family have been taught to read by their mistresses or white playfellows. To express my information as definitely as possible, I should roughly guess that one in five of all the household servants, and that one in one hundred of the field-hands on the plantations of the South, might be able to read haltingly. Half of this number might be able to write intelligibly to themselves. In certain Districts the proportion is much larger.

In this series of letters (which will be concluded with the next number) it has been a minor object with me to show the peculiarities of character and the habits of the Southerners, by describing what appeared to me remarkable in their manner of life and conversation. This class of my observations has been confined, in a great degree, to the less intelligent and cultivated people. It remains for me only to give my conclusions with regard to their condition in general.

It is estimated by a Southern writer, that five-sevenths of the whole white population of the South are non-slaveholders. Of course, this body has the political power to entirely control the destiny of the Slave States. Less information has, nevertheless, been usually given by travelers with regard to them, than the wealthy and hospitable proprietary—and their condition and character is nearly always entirely ignored by Southerners themselves in arguing the advantages of their slave system.

So far as they can be treated of as a class, the non-slaveholders are unambitious, indolent, degraded and illiterate—are a dead peasantry so far as they affect the industrial position of the South. That they are illiterate, will not only have been evident to the readers of the Times, from observations I have given, but may be proved from official statistics. Notwithstanding the constant and immense influx of an uneducated pauper class from Europe into the [253] Northern States, the proportion of those who cannot sign their names to marriage contracts and other legal papers, is much greater in every Slave State than in any Northern State—so far as the facts have been made known. I am writing in a steamboat, fast aground in the Cumberland River, and cannot refer to the authorities—but they are to be found in all good libraries, and are essentially accurate and reliable.

With regard to their moral condition, I have several times made inquiries of physicians—who almost alone of the educated class, have any valuable knowledge of them—and have invariably been informed that the number of illegitimate children among them was very great; and that many of those living together as man and wife, are never ceremonially married.

That they are non-producers, except of the necessaries of their own existence, is evident from their miserable habitations and other indications of hopeless poverty. I have just been in conversation with a gentleman of Georgia (much the most enterprising of the Southern States) who is returning home after spending the Summer at the North. He observes with regard to the white laboring class: “Poor people in our country seem to care for nothing more than to just get a living. We cannot get them to work steady, even if we give them high wages. As soon as they have earned any money, they quit, and will not go to work again until they have spent it.” Of course, as he says, there are some exceptions, but what is the exception at the South is the rule where labor in general is voluntary and not forced.

I have heretofore explained the reason of this—the degradation of all labor which is affected by Slavery. It was very concisely explained to me by a white working mechanic to-day—a foreigner, who had worked at the North, and lately moved to the South to obtain higher wages, but who was returning to the North again, dissatisfied. “Why, you see, Sir, no man will work along side of a nigger, if he can help it. It’s too much like as if he was a slave himself.”

The mode of life of the greater part of the non-slaveholders—the poor white people in the country—at the South, seems to be much the same. Some of them are mere squatters, living by sufferance on the land of others; many own a small body of unproductive land, and in the Eastern Slave States especially, a large part of them occupy a few acres of forest land, which is let to them by the owner for a term of years, on condition that they clear it and perhaps otherwise improve it. They build a small cabin or shanty, of logs, upon the ground, in which to live, with the simplest housekeeping utensils. They raise swine in the forest, and generally own a horse or a pair of cattle, and perhaps a cow—all of the meanest description. They raise on their clearing a meagre crop of corn and a few potatoes, and this, with the game they shoot, furnishes them with food. The women spin and weave, and make most of their clothing. When the land reverts to the owner, they may continue to occupy it by paying him a share (usually one-third) of the corn they raise. They are very seldom observed at work, but are often seen, like young Rip Van Winkle, lounging at the door of a grocery, or sauntering, with a gun and a dog, in the woods.

[254]

I speak not less from what I have almost everywhere seen, than from accounts given me by planters of the non-slaveholding class of their own neighborhood, in almost every district I have visited. I may be wrong in supposing such to be the condition of the larger part of the class, when the farmers of the mountain regions and some frontier districts, where few slaves are owned, are included among them; but setting these aside, the condition of the majority of the remainder cannot be much, if any superior, to that indicated in my description.

I think I have had as good means of knowing, and of painfully appreciating the evils which arise from excessive competition, to the laborers of the North, as any man, and I cannot hesitate in affirming that there is no class in the Free States, with the exception of recent immigrants and victims of intemperance, whose condition is not far better than that of the nonslaveholding population of the South. I do not forget the occasional distress of factory hands and mechanics, crowded in large towns. I have been informed of similar distress reaching to an equally painful point in manufacturing towns of the South. The real difference seems to be that the Southern work-people, hoping for less, are less demonstrative of their suffering. The only apology that I can find for the assumption constantly made by almost all Southern gentlemen and by Mrs. Tyler, that evils similar to those arising from over-competition are never found in Slave countries, is the fact of the very slight acquaintance they usually have with the vagabonds that surround them. I have hardly visited a single planter, however, who did not complain of the annoyance which the vagrant and dishonest habits of some of his poor neighbors gave him.

The unfortunate condition and character of these people, so far as they differ from those of the laboring class of the North, is mainly the direct effect of Slavery, and their material, moral and intellectual elevation will be commensurate with that of the negroes. Their ignorance and the vulgar prejudice and jealousy of low minds at present generally prevent their perception of this fact. They may, however, at some future time become a “dangerous class,” as they now are a useful one to Southern legislators. Railroads, Manufactures and other enterprises, necessary to be encouraged for the prosperity of the South, will be of more value to them than would be even the gift of common schools. There is no life without intelligence—no intelligence without ambition.