History of the United States, v.1, by James Ford Rhodes, 1910 [c1892].

Chapter 4, Part 1: Slavery through Lack of Comfort

CHAPTER IV

It will be well, at this point of my narrative, to examine the institution of negro slavery as it existed in the South. So forcibly has the word slavery come in the closing years of our century to signify a practice utterly abhorrent, that we find it difficult to realize how recently it was defended and even extolled. It is my wish to describe the institution as it may have appeared before the war to a fair-minded man. In such an inquiry it is quite easy for one of Northern birth and breeding to extenuate nothing; more care must be taken to set down naught in malice. Nevertheless, this chapter can only be a commentary on the sententious expression of Clay: "Slavery is a curse to the master and a wrong to the slave."

It was the cultivation of the semi-tropical products, cotton, sugar, and rice, that strengthened the hold of slavery on the South. No one was able to contend, with any success, that grain and tobacco could be as well cultivated by slave as by free labor. After a very careful investigation into the agricultural system of Virginia, Olmsted, who worked a farm in New York, arrived at the conclusion that one hand in New York did as much labor as two slave hands in Virginia.' Yet taking as a basis the price paid for slaves when

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1 Cotton Kingdom, Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. i. p. 134. This was a low estimate. A New Jersey farmer, who had the superintendence of very large agricultural operations in Virginia, conducted with slave labor, thought four Virginia slaves did not accomplish as much as one ordinary free farm laborer in New Jersey. This statement was confirmed by several who had a similar experience. I shall have frequent occasion to refer to Olmsted's books, The Seaboard Slave States, Texas Journey, A Journey in the Back Country, and The Cotton Kingdom, the last based on the three others. This gentleman made several journeys through the slave States between 1850 and 1857, travelling over a large part of country on horseback, which gave him unusual facilities for seeing the life of the people. His aim was to see things as they were and describe them truthfully. He has admirably succeeded, and his books are invaluable to one making a study of this subject.
In reviewing A Journey in the Back Country, James R. Lowell wrote in the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1860: "No more important contributions to contemporary American history have been made than in this volume and the two that preceded it. We know of no book that offers a parallel to them except Arthur Young's Travels in France. To discuss the question of slavery without passion or even sentiment seemed an impossibility; yet Mr. Olmsted has shown that it can be done, and, having no theory to bolster, has contrived to tell us what he saw, and not what he went to see—the rarest achievement among travellers." This was a happy comparison of the reviewer, for there was a great resemblance between Young and Olmsted in tastes, manner of observing, and impartiality of judgment. But the most important resemblance Lowell could not know in 1860. Both wrote on the eve of a great convulsion. One was the greatest historical event of the eighteenth century, and the other will probably be adjudged the greatest of the nineteenth century.
George Wm. Curtis, in the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1863, makes the statement that first of all the literature on the subject of slavery are, "in spirit and comprehension, the masterly, careful, copious, and patient works of Mr. Olmsted." The epithet of " that wise and honest traveller," which John Morley applied to Young, may likewise be said of Olmsted.

they were hired out—a common custom in Eastern Virginia —he was well satisfied that the wages for common laborers were twenty-five per cent. higher in Virginia than in New York.1 What was true of Virginia was substantially true of the other border slave States. It should have been clear that, in the portion of the South where the climate was unsuitable for cotton-raising, slavery was an economical failure; and before the war, as at present, this conclusion necessarily followed the inquiries of an impartial observer. If there had been any justification for slavery it must have been found in the cotton, rice, or sugar regions.
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1 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 118.

What was there in mitigation of the wrong done the slave? It used to be said that the slaves were better fed, better clothed, and better lodged than laborers in the cities and manufacturing districts at the North. Yet no statement more completely false was ever made. A report to the Secretary of the Treasury from forty-six sugar-planters of Louisiana stated that the cost of feeding and clothing an able-bodied slave was thirty dollars per year. Olmsted estimates that the clothing would amount to ten dollars, which would leave twenty dollars for the food, or five and one half cents per day.' "Does the food of a first-rate laborer," he asks, "anywhere in the free world cost less?" This was a fair example of the cost of supporting the negroes on the large sugar and cotton plantations of the Southwest. Corn-meal was the invariable article of food furnished the slaves; bacon and molasses were regularly provided on some plantations, while on others they were only occasional luxuries. Fanny Kemble, the accomplished actress, who spent a winter on her husband's rice and cotton plantations in Georgia, says that animal food was only given to men who were engaged in the hardest kind of work, such as ditching, and to them it was given only occasionally and in moderate quantities. Her description of the little negroes begging her piteously for meat is as pathetic as the incident of the hungry demand of Oliver Twist.2 This rude fare was generally given the slave in sufficient quantity; the instances are rare in which one finds the negroes did not have enough to eat. Frederick Douglass, however, tells us that, when a child, although belonging to a wealthy and large landed proprietor of Maryland, he was often pinched with hunger, and used to dispute
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1 Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 238.
2 Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39, Frances Anne Kemble, p. 134; see also p. 65. This was not published until 1863. In the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1863, George Wm. Curtis says: "This book is a permanent and most valuable chapter in our history; for it is the first ample, lucid, faithful, detailed account from the actual headquarters of a slave plantation in this country."

with the dogs the crumbs which fell from the kitchen table.1 In comparison with slaves who had plenty, the prison convicts of the North were given food in greater variety and not so coarse.2 "Ninety-nine in a hundred of our free laborers," wrote Olmsted, "from choice and not from necessity, live, in respect to food, at least four times as well as the average of the hardest-worked slaves on the Louisiana sugar plantations.'3 The negroes on the large cotton plantations of the Southwest fared no better. A Louisiana cotton planter furnished De Bow an itemized estimate of the cost of raising cotton, in which the expense of feeding one hundred slaves, furnishing the hospital, overseer's table, etc., was put down at $750 for the year. This was $7.50 for each one, or, in other words, the cost of food for the slave was less than 2 1/12 cents per day.4 The overseers everywhere endeavored to bring the keeping of the slaves down to the lowest possible figure. This was a large item in the cost of cotton production; and on the large plantations, where in some cases as many as five hundred slaves were worked, economy in feeding these human cattle was studied with almost scientific precision. The supply of food to the slaves was made a subject of legislation. Louisiana required that meat should be furnished, but this law became a dead letter. North Carolina fixed the daily allowance of corn; in the other States the law was not specific, but directed in general terms that the provisions should be sufficient for the health of the slave.

It was in the line of plantation parsimony that the clothes furnished the field hands should be of the cheapest material and as scant as was consistent with a slight regard for
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1 Life of Frederick Douglass, by himself, p. 22; see also pp. 45, 61, 108.
2 Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 241.
3 Ibid., p. 239; Despotism in America, Hildreth, pp. 58,60; Slave States of America, Buckingham, vol. i. pp. 87, 134.
4 De Bow's Resources of the South and West, vol. i. p. 150.

decency and health. All observers agree that the slaves who labored on the cotton and sugar plantations presented a ragged, unkempt, and dirty appearance.1

Comfortable houses were in many places built for the negroes;2 but, owing to their indolent and filthy habits, which were aggravated by their condition of servitude, neatness and the appearance of comfort soon disappeared from their quarters. The testimony is almost universal that the negro cabins were foul and wretched.3

In the cotton, sugar, and rice districts the negroes were hard worked. The legal limit of a day's work in South Carolina was fifteen hours; on cotton plantations, during the picking season, the slaves labored sixteen hours, while on sugar plantations at grinding time eighteen hours' work was exacted.4 Many of the large owners of land and of negroes in the Southwest were absentees, whose authority was delegated to their overseers. Indeed, in all cases where the agricultural operations were on a large scale, the overseer was the power. Patrick Henry described the overseers as "the most abject, degraded, unprincipled race."5 Years had not improved them, and on the lonely plantations of the Southwest they were hardly amenable to public opinion or subject to the law's control. They were generally ignorant,
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1 The Louisiana cotton-planter before referred to said the cost of clothing one hundred slaves, shoeing them, furnishing bedding, sacks for gathering cotton, etc., was $750 per annum.
2 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 320.
3 I quote observations of Frances Kemble on several Georgia plantations. "I found there [at St. Annie's] the wretchedest huts, and most miserably squalid, filthy, and forlorn creatures I had yet seen here," p. 187. "The negro huts on several of the plantations that we passed through were the most miserable human habitations I ever beheld," p. 242. "Miserable negro huts" which "were not fit to shelter cattle," p. 248. See also Slave States of America, Buckingham, vol. i. p. 134.
4 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 328; vol. ii. p. 180.
5 Life of Patrick Henry, Wirt, cited in Stroud's Slave Laws, p. 74; see also Mrs. Davis's remarks on overseers, Memoir of Jefferson Davis, vol i. p. 477.

frequently intemperate, always despotic and brutal. Their value was rated according to the bigness of the cotton crop they made, and, with that end in view, they spared not the slave. The slaves always worked under the lash. "It is true," said Chancellor Harper, in his defence of slavery, "that the slave is driven to labor by stripes."1 With each gang went a stout negro driver whose qualification for the position depended upon his unusual cruelty; he followed the working slaves, urging them in their task by a loud voice and the cracking of his long whip. That the negroes were overtasked to the extent of being often permanently injured, was evident from the complaints made by the Southern agricultural journals against the bad policy of thus wasting human property. An Alabama tradesman told Olmsted that if the overseers make "plenty of cotton, the owners never ask how many niggers they kill;"2 and he gave the further information that a determined and perfectly relentless overseer could get almost any wages he demanded, for when it became known that such a man had made so many bales to the hand, everybody would try to get him.3

In the rich cotton-planting districts the negro was universally regarded as property. When the newspapers mentioned the sudden death of one of them, it was the loss of money that was bewailed, and not of the light which no Promethean heat can relume. Olmsted found that " negro life and negro vigor were generally much less carefully economized than I had always before imagined them to be."4 Louisiana sugar-planters did not hesitate to avow openly that, on the whole, they found it the best economy to work off their stock of negroes about once in seven years, and then buy an entire set of new hands." An overseer
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1 Pro-slavery Argument, p. 34.
2 The same man, however, expressed the opinion that " niggers is generally pretty well treated, considerin'." Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 184.
3 Ibid., p. 186.
4 Ibid., p. 191.
5 Frances Kemble's Journal, p. 28; Society in America, H. Martineau, vol. i. p. 308; Weld's Slavery as It Is, cited in Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 41.

once said to Olmsted: "Why, sir, I wouldn't mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog."1 The restraint of the law did not operate powerfully to prevent the killing of these unfortunates. While the wilful, malicious, and premeditated murder of a slave was a capital offence in all the slave-holding States, it was provided in most of them that any person killing a slave in the act of resistance to his lawful owner was guilty of no offence, nor was there ground for an indictment in the case where a slave died while receiving moderate correction.2 But what protected the overseers on plantations remote from settlements and neighbors was the universal rule of slave law, that the testimony of a colored person could not be received against a white.3 This gave complete immunity to the despotic overseer. On but few plantations were there more than two white men, and they were always interested parties, being owner, manager, or overseer. As a matter of fact, only refractory slaves, or negroes attempting to run away, were killed, and these murders were not frequent. Except in rare instances the slaves had no incentive to work, save the fear of a whipping.4 "If you don't work faster," or " if you don't work better, I will have you flogged," were words often heard.5 No one can wonder that it was a painful sight to see negroes at work. The besotted and generally repulsive expression of the field hands; their brute-like countenances, on which were painted stupidity, indolence, duplicity, and sensuality; their listlessness; their dogged action; the stupid, plodding, machine-like manner in which they labored, made a sorrowful picture of man's inhumanity
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1 Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 203. See account of the murder of a slave in Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 57.
2 Stroud's Slave Laws, pp. 56 and 61.
3 Ibid., p. 41.
4 Life of Frederick Douglass, by himself, p. 117.
5 Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 203.

to man.1 General Sherman, who was for a time stationed at New Orleans and later lived more than a year in Louisiana, states that the field slaves were treated like animals.2 Fanny Kemble noticed that those who had some intelligence, who were beyond the brutish level, wore a pathetic expression — a mixture of sadness and fear.3 Frederick Douglass, himself a slave and the only negro in his neighborhood who could read, relates the effect of unceasing and habitual toil on one in whom there was a gleam of knowledge: "My natural elasticity was crushed; my intellect languished; the disposition to read departed; the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died out; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me, and behold a man transformed to a brute."4 An observer who visited an average rice plantation near Savannah was impressed with the fate of the field hands: "Their lot was one of continued toil from morning to night, uncheered even by the hope of any change or prospect of improvement in condition." 5 Harriet Martineau wrote: "A walk through a lunatic asylum is far less painful than a visit to the slave quarter of an estate."6 This state of affairs is perfectly comprehensible; it was an accessory of the system. It was Olmsted's judgment that a certain degree of cruelty was necessary to make slave labor generally profitable.7

The institution bore harder on the women than on the men. Slave-breeding formed an important part of plantation economy, being encouraged as was the breeding of animals. "Their lives are, for the most part, those of mere animals;" wrote Fanny Kemble, "their increase is literally mere animal breeding, to which every encouragement is
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1 See Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. pp. 142, 245; vol. ii. p. 202.
2 North American Review, October, 1888.
3 Frances Kemble's Journal, p. 98.
4 Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 119.
5 Slave States of America, Buckingham, vol. i. p. 133.
6 Society in America, vol. i. p. 224.
7 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 354.

given, for it adds to the master's live-stock and the value of his estate." 1 The women worked in the fields as did the men. When it became known that they were pregnant, their task was lightened, yet, if necessary, they were whipped when with child, and, in some cases, were put to work again as early as three weeks after their confinement, although generally the time of rest allowed was one month. Fanny Kemble's woman heart bled at the tales of suffering she heard, of the rapid child-bearing, the gross disregard of nature's laws of maternity, and the consequent wide prevalence of diseases peculiar to the sex; her daily record of what she saw and heard is as pitiful as it is true.2

The money return for this degradation of humankind came mainly from the growth of cotton. Of the 3,177,000 slaves in 1850, De Bow estimated that 1,800,000 were engaged in the cotton-culture.3 The value of this crop amounted to much more than that of the combined production of sugar and rice.4 Cotton was then, as now, not only the most important article of commerce of the South, but was by far the greatest export from the whole country.5 It formed the basis of the material prosperity of the South,
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1 Frances Kemble's Journal, p. 122. "A woman thinks . . . that the more frequently she adds to the number of her master's live-stock by bringing new slaves into the world, the more claims she will have upon his consideration and good-will. This was perfectly evident to me from the meritorious air with which the women always made haste to inform me of the number of children they had borne, and the frequent occasions on which the older slaves would direct my attention to their children, exclaiming, 'Look, missis 1 little niggers for you and massa; plenty little niggers for you and little missis!' "—Frances Kemble's Journal, p. 60.
2 See Frances Kemble's Journal, pp. 60, 200,251.
3 De Bow's Resources of the South and West, vol. iii. p. 419; Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 17.
4 Value of crops in 1850: cotton, $105,600,000; sugar, $12,396,150; rice, $3,000,000.
De Bow's Resources, vol. iii. p. 40.
5 The total domestic exports for the year ending June 30th, 1850, were $136,946,912, of which cotton furnished $71,984,616, and bread-stuffs and provisions, $26,051,373. De Bow's Resources, vol. iii. pp. 388,391,392.

and there was economic foundation for the statement, so arrogantly made, that " Cotton is king."

The profits of cotton-growing in a new country were very large. Harriet Martineau, who visited Alabama in 1835, was told that the profits were thirty-five per cent. One planter whom she knew had two years previously invested $15,000 in land, which he could then sell for $65,000; but he expected at this time to make fifty or sixty thousand dollars out of his growing crop.1 Land was so plenty that no one took any pains to prevent its exhaustion, and when a good yield of cotton could no longer be had, the land was abandoned, and more virgin soil was purchased. When Olmsted visited the South, Mississippi and Louisiana were the States which offered the largest returns. He visited one Mississippi plantation where five hundred negroes were worked, the profit in a single year being $100,000.2 The rich country tributary to Natchez, as well as that along the Yazoo River, was all owned by large proprietors, none of whom were worth less than $100,000, and the property of some was popularly estimated by millions. The ignorant newly-rich seemed to be as large an element of society in Mississippi as they were in New York.3 A Southern lawyer truly describes a phase of the cotton industry. Wealth was rapidly acquired by planters who began with limited means, and whose success was due to their industry, economy, and self-denial. They devoted most of their profits to the increase of their capital, with the result that in a few years, as if by magic, large estates were accumulated. "The fortunate proprietors then build fine houses, and surround themselves with comforts and luxuries to which they were strangers in their earlier years of care and toil."4

An unwise and wasteful conduct of the business, however,
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1 Society in America, vol. i. p. 228.
2 Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 83.
3 Ibid., pp. 158,159.
4 Letter to Harper's Weekly, February, 1859 Quoted in Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 158.

accompanied this prosperity. The profits were laid out in more land and negroes; the prospect of enlarged gains and greater social consideration were alike incentives to increase these holdings. Frequently the coming crop was mortgaged for money at high rates of interest, and the plantation supplies were furnished by factors at extravagant prices. No system could be more ruinous; yet the demand for the world's great staple continued to be so active, and the profit of raising cotton so enormous, that the cotton regions of the Southwest were, in the decade before the war, very prosperous. This prosperity was the boast of the Southerner, and the notion widely prevailed that in material well-being the South went ahead of the North.1 The acme of this idea was attained when Senator Hammond taunted the North with the results of the financial panic of 1857. "When the abuse of credit," said he, "had destroyed credit and annihilated confidence; when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coming down, and hundreds of millions of dollars of supposed property evaporating in thin air; when you came to a dead-lock, and revolutions were threatened, what brought you up? Fortunately for you, it was the commencement of the cotton season, and we have poured upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of cotton just at the crisis to save you from destruction."2 Every one knows that those were bragging words; nevertheless, the prosperity of the cotton States was real. Nowhere else existed such a union of soil and climate adapted to the growth
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1 See various articles in De Bow's Resources; De Bow's Review; Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, by T. P. Kettell, New York, 1861; also speech of Hammond, of South Carolina, in the United States Senate, March 4th, 1858. But in 1890 the leading senator of South Carolina saw the matter in a different light. "I assert, what I believe is not denied, that the institution of slavery retarded and hindered the material development of those States where it existed; certainly so as compared with their sister free States."—Butler, in the Senate, January 16th, 1890.
2 In the Senate, March 4th, 1858, Speeches and Letters of J. H. Hammond, p. 317.

of the staple, which was always in brisk and increasing demand. The Southerners maintained that their wealth was due to their peculiar institution; that without slavery there could not be a liberal cotton supply.1 This assertion has been effectually disproved by the results since emancipation, while even in the decade before the war it could with good and sufficient reason be questioned. It was apparent to the economist that the rich gifts of nature, the concentration of capital and the combination of laborers accounted for the fruitful returns of cotton-planting. It was patent that with free white labor better results could be obtained.2 It is quite true, however, that the practical question did not lie between slave labor and free white labor, but between the negro bondman and the negro freeman. Northern and English observers, for the most part, staggered when confronted with the horns of the dilemma; yet they certainly amassed sufficient facts to venture the assertion that if the slaves were freed, cotton-planting would be as remunerative to the master as before, and that the physical condition of the laborer would be improved. The demand for cotton and negroes went hand in hand; a high price of the staple made a high value for the human cattle. A traveller going through the South would hear hardly more than two subjects discussed in public places—the price of cotton and the price of slaves. 3

This kind of property was very high in the decade before
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1 "The first and most obvious effect [of abolition of slavery] would be to put an end to the cultivation of our great Southern staple."—Chancellor Harper, Pro-slavery Argument, 1852, p. 86. "The average annual yield [of cotton] during the twenty years previous to 1861 was 1,335,000,000 pounds; during the twenty-three years from 1865 to 1886 it was 2,207,000,000 pounds, an increase of 65.3 per cent."—The United States, Whitney, p. 383. The crop of 1850 was 2,233,718 bales, value $105,600,000. The crop of 1880 was 5,757,397 bales, value $275,000,000.
2 This subject is thoroughly discussed in A Journey in the Back Country, Olmsted, p. 296, and in his Texas Journey, p. xiii. See also Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 202.
3 See Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 51.

the war, a good field hand being worth from one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars. Since the adoption of the Constitution the price of slaves had increased manifold, and after 1835 the advance was especially marked.1 The need of slaves in the cotton region kept slavery alive in the border States; for the Southwest was a ready purchaser of negroes, and Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky, States which could employ slave labor to little advantage, always had a surplus for sale. The salubrious climate of these States produced a hardy laborer who was in great request in the cotton and sugar districts. The negroes of Virginia and Kentucky considered it a cruel doom to be sold to go South, as it was well understood that harder work and poorer fare would be their lot. The annual waste of life on the sugar plantations of Louisiana was two and one-half per cent. over and above the natural increase.2 On the cotton estates the increase, if any, was slight. On one of the best-managed estates in Mississippi, Olmsted learned that the net increase amounted to four per cent.; on Virginia farms, however, it was frequently twenty per cent. Nevertheless, between 1830 and 1850 the slave population of Maryland decreased and that of Virginia remained stationary, while Louisiana more than doubled, Alabama nearly trebled, and Mississippi almost quintupled their number of slaves. These facts disclose the proportions of the internal slave-trade and of that most wretched aspect of the institution, the breeding of slaves for market. Even so methodical and frugal a planter as Washington found that if negroes were kept on the same land, and they and all their increase supported upon it, " their owner would gradually become more and more embarrassed or impoverished.”
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1 The Slave-trade, Carey, p. 112; Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, Kettell, pp. 130 and 135; Thirty Years' View, Benton, vol. ii. p. 782; A Journey in the Back Country, Olmsted, pp. 326 and 374.
2 Report of the Agricultural Society of Baton Rouge, La. ;, letter of Johnson, M. C. from Louisiana, to the Secretary of the Treasury, cited on p. 174, Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stearns (1853). The author was an Episcopal clergyman of Maryland, and the book a defence of slavery.

Yet the financial remedy was not adopted by Washington; he made a rule neither to buy nor sell slaves.1 Jefferson, although in easy circumstances when he retired from the presidency, could not make both ends meet on his Monticello estate, and died largely in debt.2 Madison sold some of his best land to feed the increasing number of his negroes, but he confessed to Harriet Martineau that the week before she visited him he had been obliged to sell a dozen of his slaves.3 We may be certain it was with great reluctance that the gentlemen of Virginia came to the point of breeding negroes to make money; but it was the easiest way to maintain their ancient state, so they eventually overcame their scruples. Even before Madison died, the professor of history and metaphysics in the college at which Jefferson was educated wrote in a formal paper: "The slaves in Virginia multiply more rapidly than in most of the Southern States; the Virginians can raise cheaper than they can buy; in fact, it is one of their greatest sources of profit;" and the writer seemed to exult over the fact that they were now "exporting slaves" very rapidly.4 He wrote his defence of slavery in 1832, and then thought that Virginia was annually sending six thousand negroes to the Southern market.' For the ten years preceding 1860 the average annual importation of slaves into seven Southern States from the slave breeding States was not far from twenty-five thousand.6 In Virginia the women exceeded in number the men, and

1 Bancroft, vol. vi. p. 179. See also letter of Washington, printed in the Athenaeum, July 11th, and cited by the New York Nation, July 30th, 1891.
2 Life of Jefferson, Morse, p. 335.
3 Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. i. p. 192.
4 Prof. Dew, Pro-slavery Argument, pp. 362, 370. He afterwards became President of William and Mary College.
5 Ibid., p. 378.
6 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 58, note. See Slavery and Secession, Thos. Ellison, p. 223. The slave exporting States were Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri; see also Pike's First Blows of the Civil War, pp. 386, 392.

were regarded in much the same way as are brood-mares.1 A Virginia gentleman, in conversation with Olmsted, congratulated himself "because his women were uncommonly good breeders; he did not suppose there was a lot of women anywhere that bred faster than his; he never heard of babies coming so fast as they did on his plantation; . . . and every one of them, in his estimation, was worth two hundred dollars, as negroes were selling now, the moment it drew breath." 2 Frederick Douglass had a master, professedly a Christian, opening and closing the day with family prayer, who boasted that he bought a woman slave simply "as a breeder." 3 When James Freeman Clarke visited Baltimore, a friend who had been to a party one night said there was pointed out to him a lady richly and fashionably dressed, and apparently one moving in the best society, who derived her income from the sale of the children of a half-dozen negro women she owned, although their husbands belonged to other masters.4 Sometimes a negro woman would be advertised for sale as being "very prolific in her generating qualities."5

The law in none of the States recognized slave marriages;6 in all of them the Roman principle, that the child followed the condition of its mother, was the recognized rule. Ex. cept in Louisiana, there was no law to prevent the violent separation of husbands from wives, or children from their parents.7 The church conformed its practice to the law. The question was put to the Savannah River Baptist Association, whether in the case that slaves were separated, they
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1 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 57. See debate in Virginia legislature, 1831-32.
2 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 59.
3 Life of Douglass, p. 118.
4 Anti-slavery Days, James Freeman Clarke, p. 32.
5 Goodell's American Slave Code, p. 84.
6 There was a faint recognition by statute in Maryland, and by judicial decision in Louisiana; but neither was of practical value. They did not prevent the separation by sale of husband from wife. Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stearns, p. 38.
7 Stroud's Slave Laws, p. 82.

should be allowed to marry again. The answer was in the affirmative, because the separation was civilly equivalent to death, and the ministers believed "that in the sight of God it would be so viewed." It would not be right, therefore, to forbid second marriages. It was proper that the slaves should act in obedience to their masters and raise up for them progeny.1 The negro women lacked in chastity; it is true this was a natural inclination of the African race, but that this tendency should be fostered was an inevitable result of slavery. "Licentiousness and almost indiscriminate sexual connection among the young," said Olmsted, "are very general."2

Slaves were chattels.3 They could be transferred by a simple bill of sale as horses or cattle; they could even be sold or given away by their masters without a writing.4 The cruelty of separating families, involved by the business of selling slaves who were raised expressly for market, or by the division of negroes among the heirs of a decedent, or their forced sale occasioned by the bankruptcy of an owner, appealed very forcibly to the North. It especially awakened the sympathy of Northern women, who counted for much in educating and influencing voters in a way that finally brought about the abolition of slavery. These separations were not infrequent, although they were not the general rule. There was a disposition, on the score of self-interest, to avoid the tearing asunder of family ties, for the reason that if slaves pined on account of parting from those to whom they had become attached, they labored less obediently and were more troublesome. Humane masters would, whenever possible, avoid selling the husband apart from the
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1 Goodell's American Slave Code, p. 109; Memorials of a Southern Planter, Smedes, p. 77.
2 Seaboard Slave States, Olmsted, p. 132.
3 In Louisiana and Kentucky they were in some cases considered real estate, but they did not partake enough of the quality of real property to prevent their being sold off from an estate. See Goodell, pp. 24,25, 71,75.
4 Be Bow's Review, vol. viii. p. 69.

wife, or young children away from the mother. The best public sentiment of the South frowned upon an unnecessary separation of families. It was not unusual to find men making a money sacrifice to prevent a rending of family attachments, or generous people contributing a sum to avert such an evil.1 The prominence given in their arguments by the abolitionists to this feature of the system undoubtedly influenced the South to abate this cruelty. The apologists of slavery never defended the separation of families; it was admitted to be a necessary evil, and pains were taken to give Northern and foreign visitors the impression that such cases were of rare occurrence.

It is very probable that a good deal of the Northern sympathy on this subject was misplaced. Heart-rending scenes at slave auctions certainly took place, and the many incidents recounted in the abolition literature are perhaps all of them trustworthy relations,2 yet they as surely represent
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1 Lyell, Second Visit to the United States, vol. i. p. 209; Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 40; Pro-slavery Argument, p. 132. For the subject discussed thoroughly, from the abolitionist standpoint, see Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 133. The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin is mainly a collection of pieces justificatives. For confirmation of statements in the text, see p. 137. Memorials of a Southern Planter, Smedes, p. 48. The result of Edmund Yates's observations was that separations were frequent. "At Richmond and New Orleans I was present at slave auctions, and did not see one instance of a married pair being sold together; but, without exception, so far as I was able to learn from the negroes sold by the auctioneers, every grown-up man left a wife, and every grown-up woman a husband."—Letter to the Women of England, cited in Greeley's American Conflict, p. 70.
2 See the account of the editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, December 25th, 1846, of a sale at Petersburg, Virginia, cited in Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 137. When the negroes found out that they were to be sold "the effect was indescribably agonizing." A mother cried "in frantic grief" when her boy was sold. "During the sale, the quarters resounded with cries and lamentations that made my heart ache."
Edmund Yates writes: "I saw Mr. Pulliam [of Richmond] sell to different buyers two daughters away from their mother, who was also to be sold. This unfortunate woman was a quadroon; and I shall not soon forget the large tears that started to her eyes as she saw her two children sold away from her."
"Who was the greatest orator you ever heard?" asked Josiah Quincy of John Randolph. "The greatest orator I ever heard," replied Randolph, "was a woman. She was a slave. She was a mother, and her rostrum was the auction-block."—Figures of the Past, p. 212.
See account of Lewis Hayden, Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 155; Antislavery Manual (1837), p. 109; Slave States of America, Buckingham, vol. i. p. 183; also Retrospect of Western Travel, Martineau, vol. i. p. 235.

only a phase and not the universal rule. The detailed, minute, and celebrated account of a slave auction at Richmond by William Chambers, the publisher, of Edinburgh, is undoubtedly a fair example of what many times occurred. At one establishment there were ten negroes offered for sale. The intending purchasers examined the slaves by feeling the arms of all and the ankles of the women; they looked into their mouths and examined carefully their hands and fingers. One of the lots was a full-blooded negro woman with three children. "Her children were all girls, one of them a baby at the breast, three months old, and the others two and three years of age. . . . There was not a tear or an emotion visible in the whole party. Everything seemed to be considered a matter of course; and the change of owners was possibly looked forward to with as much indifference as ordinary hired servants anticipate a removal from one employer to another." Chambers took an offered opportunity to converse with the woman, who told him she had been parted from her husband two days, and that her heart was almost broken at the thought of the lasting separation. The writer continues: "I have said that there was an entire absence of emotion in the party of men, women, and children thus seated, preparatory to being sold. This does not correspond with the ordinary accounts of slave sales, which are represented as tearful and harrowing. My belief is that none of the parties felt deeply on the subject, or at least that any distress they experienced was but momentary—
soon passed away and was forgotten. One of my reasons for this opinion rests on a trifling incident which occurred. While waiting for the commencement of the sale, one of the gentlemen present amused himself with a pointer-dog which, at command, stood on its hind-legs and took pieces of bread from his pocket. These tricks greatly entertained the row of negroes, old and young; and the poor woman whose heart three minutes before was almost broken now laughed as heartily as any one."1 Chambers spent a forenoon in visiting different establishments where slaves were sold at auction.
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1 Things in America, W. Chambers, pp. 279, 280. The whole account is worth reading. A similar account of a slave auction, which took place at Savannah, may be found in the New York Tribune of April 28th, 1860, translated from Das Ausland; see also Promenade en Amerique, J. J. Ampere, tome ii. p. 113. See also account of the "great auction sale of slaves at Savannah, March 2d and 3d, 1859," by a correspondent of the New York Tribune, published in the New York Tribune, and in pamphlet in 1863.
When Seward visited Virginia, in 1846, there were on the steamboat on which he travelled seventy-five slaves who were on the way to New Orleans to be sold. As they arrived at a port of entry where the ship lay at anchor which was to take them south, Seward watched them with intense interest as they filed from the steamboat to the ship, which had already one hundred and twenty-five fellow negroes doomed to the same destiny. He writes: "As I stood looking at this strange scene a gentleman stepped up to my side and said, 'You see the curse that our forefathers bequeathed to us.'
"I replied,' Yes,' and turned away, to conceal manifestations of sympathy I might not express.
"'Oh,' said my friend, 'they don't mind it; they are cheerful; they enjoy the transportation and travel as much as you do.'
"' I am glad they do,' said I, 'poor wretches!'
"The lengthened file at last had all reached the deck of the slaver, and we cut loose. The captain of our boat, seeing me intensely interested, turned to me and said: 'Oh! sir, do not be concerned about them; they are the happiest people in the world.' I looked, and there they were— slaves, ill protected from the cold, fed capriciously on the commonest food —going from all that was dear to all that was terrible, and still they wept not. I thanked God that he had made them insensible. And these were 'the happiest people in the world 1'"—Life of Seward, vol. i. p. 778.

His blood boiled with indignation to see a human being, though with a black skin, sold "just like a horse at Tattersall's;" yet he closed his narrative with: "It would not have been difficult to speak strongly on a subject which appeals so greatly to the feelings; but I have preferred telling the simple truth."

Jefferson, who hated slavery and who studied negroes with the eye of the planter and philosopher, thus compared them with the whites: "They are more ardent after their female; but love seems with them to be more an eager desire than a tender, delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt and sooner forgotten with them."1 A careful study of the slaves of the generation before the civil war must lead to the same conclusion.2 The earnest and educated women of the North unconsciously invested the negroes with their own fine feelings, and estimated the African's grief at separation from her family by what would be their own at a like fate. The selling of a wife away from her husband, or a mother away from her children, appeared to their emotional natures simply horrible. It seemed a cruel act, for which there could be no excuse or mitigation. It was a vulnerable part of the system; the abolitionists, attacking it with impetuosity, gained the sympathy of the larger portion of thinking Northern women. This earnestness was not simulated, for the injustice likewise appealed strongly to the emotional temperaments of the abolitionists. Garrison identified himself so closely with the negroes, whose cause he had made
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1 Notes on Virginia, Jefferson's Works, vol. viii. p. 382.
2 See account of a slave auction at Richmond in Travels of Artoredson, Anti-slavery Manual, p. 114; also Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 152; Olmsted's Seaboard Slave States, p. 556; Promenade en Amerique, J. J. Ampere, vol. ii. p. 115. "The negro [in Africa] knows not love, affection, or jealousy."—Cited by Herbert Spencer, Sociology, vol. i. p. 663. "The negro race do not understand kissing."—Ibid., vol. ii. p. 17.

his own, that in addressing a body of them he said that he was ashamed of his own color.1

It could not be denied that an extensive traffic in slaves existed all through the South. "Cash for Negroes," "Negroes for Sale," and "Negroes Wanted," were as common advertisements in the Southern papers as notices of proposed sales of horses and mules. Indeed, the two kinds of property were frequently advertised and sold together. An administrator offers "horses, mules, cattle, hogs, sheep, and several likely young negroes;" a sheriff announces the sale of "ten head of cattle, twenty-five head of hogs, and seven negroes;" an auctioneer bespeaks attendance at the courthouse in Columbia, S. C, for an opportunity such as seldom occurs, for he will offer one hundred valuable negroes, among whom are " twenty-five prime young men, forty of the most likely young women, and as fine a set of children as can be shown." A dealer at Memphis offers the highest cash price for slaves, and one at Baltimore wants to buy five thousand negroes and announces that families are "never separated." A firm at Natchez, Miss., advertises "fresh arrivals weekly of slaves," and promises to keep constantly "a large and well-selected stock." A competitor in the same city offers "ninety negroes just arrived from Richmond, consisting of field hands, house servants, carriage drivers, several fine cooks, and some excellent mules, and one very fine riding horse;" and he advises his patrons that he has "made arrangements in Richmond to have regular shipments every month, and intends to keep a good stock on hand of every description of servants." An auctioneer in New Orleans announces for sale three splendid paintings," The Circassian Slave," "The Lion Fight," and "The Crucifixion;" also, "Delia, aged seventeen, a first-rate cook; Susan, aged sixteen, a mulatress, a good house-girl; Ben, aged fourteen, and Peyton, aged sixteen, smart house-boys;" and adds," The above slaves are fully guaranteed and sold for no fault." A
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1 Life of Garrison, vol. i. p. 158.

storekeeper of New Orleans, who was likewise a colonel, at the request of his many acquaintances got up for their amusement a raffle where the prizes were a dark-bay horse, warranted sound, with a trotting buggy and harness, and "the stout mulatto girl Sarah, aged about twenty-nine years, general house-servant, valued at nine hundred dollars and guaranteed."1 There might be seen now and then in the New Orleans papers an advertisement of a lot of pious negroes.2 A curious notice appeared in the Religious Herald, a Baptist journal published in Richmond: "Who wants thirty-five thousand dollars in property? I am desirous to spend the balance of my life as a missionary, if the Lord permit, and therefore offer for sale my farm—the vineyard adjacent to Williamsburg . . . and also about forty servants, mostly young and likely, and rapidly increasing in numbers and value." 3 By actual count made from the advertisements in sixty-four newspapers published in eight slave States during the last two weeks of November, 1852, there were offered for sale four thousand one hundred negroes.4 The good society of the South looked upon slave dealers and auctioneers with contempt. Their occupation was regarded as base, and they were treated by gentlemen as the publicans were by the Pharisees. The opening scene of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was criticised as inaccurate, for it showed a Kentucky gentleman entertaining at table a vulgar slave-dealer.5 The utter scorn with which such men
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1 New Orleans True Delta, January 11th, 1853, cited in Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 182; New Orleans Picayune, January, 1844; Second Visit to America, Lyell, vol. ii. p. 126; Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 134 etseq., where copies of large numbers of similar advertisements may be found. See description and illustration of an auction in the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, New Orleans, of estates, pictures, and slaves. Slave States of America, Buckingham, vol. i. p. 334.
2 Retrospect of Western Travel, Martineau, vol. i. p. 250.
3 New York Independent, March 21st, 1850.
4 Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 142.
5 Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stearns, p. 145.

were regarded was a condemnation of slavery in the house of its friends.1

A feature of the institution that aroused much indignation at the North was its cruelty, as evidenced by the rigor with which the lash was used. We have seen that flogging necessarily accompanied this system of labor.2 The master and the overseer held the theory that the negroes were but children and should be chastised on the principle of the ancient schoolmaster who carried out the injunctions of Solomon. This was also in the main the practice, but wanton cruelty did not rule.2 At times, however, a fit of drunkenness, an access of ill-temper, or a burst of passion would incite the man who had unrestrained power to use it like a brute.4 Abolition literature is full of such instances, well attested.

Slaves were sometimes whipped to death.5 The murderers were occasionally tried, and once in a while convicted,
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1 "You [i.e. the Southern people] have among you a sneaking individual of the class of native tyrants known as the slave-dealer. He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it. you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony—instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. . . . Now, why is this? You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle, or tobacco."—Lincoln at Peoria, October 16th, 1854. Life by Howells, p. 276.
2 See pp. 308 and 309.
3 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 354; Kemble, p. 229. "The slave-owners, as a body, are not cruel, and many of them treat their slaves with paternal and patriarchal kindness."—Life and Liberty in America, Chas. Mackay, vol. i. p. 314.
4 Olmsted's Seaboard Slave States, p. 485; Kemble, p. 175; Life of Fred. Douglass, pp. 38, 111. See also the graphic account of the whipping of a woman which Olmsted witnessed, Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 205.
5 See Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, pp. 60-80, 92 et seq.

but they were never hanged; more frequently, however, as the violent act was usually witnessed only by negroes, no proof could be obtained,1 and the perpetrator was not even arrested. When negroes themselves committed a capital crime, there were instances of burning them to death at the stake.2

One finds, however, notice of plantations on which the slaves were never whipped. Ampere, who had no sympathy with slavery, visited a German who owned a plantation near Charleston, and who, having no cruelty or tyranny in his nature, appeared to be literally oppressed by his blacks. He was so humane that he would not whip his slaves. The slaves showed him little gratitude, and labored sluggishly and with great carelessness. When he went into a cabin where the negresses were at work cleaning cotton, he confined himself to showing them how badly their task was done and explaining to them the considerable damage which their negligence caused him. His observations were received with grumbling and sullenness. Ampere saw in this case an excellent argument against slavery. Had the gentleman hired his laborers he would have dismissed them if they did not work to his liking; but under the Southern system his choice lay simply between whipping them or becoming a victim to their idleness.3 Masters like this were
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1 See p. 309.
2 See Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. pp. 348, 354. "That slaves have ever been burned alive has been indignantly denied. The late Judge Jay told me that he had evidence in his possession of negro burnings every year in the last twenty." See also New York Weekly Tribune, October 3d, 1857; Antislavery History of the John Brown Year, p. 205; Debate in the House of Representatives, March 8th, 1860; New York Tribune, March 12th, 20th, and August 24th, 1860. The grave historian Richard Hildreth so abhorred slavery that, before writing his serious work, Despotism in America, he gave to the press anonymously a novel, The White Slave, in which he describes with fidelity the burning of a negro at the stake, who was a fugitive and a murderer, see chap. xlv.
3 Promenade en Amerique, J. J. Ampere, tome i. p. 114.

certainly rare in the cotton region, but as one travelled northward, slavery appeared under milder features. A New England girl became a governess upon a Tennessee plantation where no slave had been whipped for seven years; she became reconciled to slavery, and did not find in reality the "revolting horrors" in it for which a Northern education had prepared her.1 In Virginia, Olmsted saw no whipping of slaves except of wild, lazy children as they were being broken in to work; and he heard of but little harshness or cruelty.2

In our time, when the desire for education is common to all, and the need of it universally acknowledged, it is interesting to inquire how this matter was dealt with by the slaveholders. North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana forbade, under penalties, the teaching of slaves to read or write. In Virginia the owners, but no one else, might instruct their negroes, and in North Carolina the slaves might be taught arithmetic. Some of these enactments were on the statute-books before 1831, but everywhere after that date the laws were made more stringent and were more effectually enforced.3 This year was memorable for the Nat Turner insurrection and for the beginning of a systematic abolition agitation by Garrison in the Liberator. The usual apology at the South for these laws was their alleged necessity to prevent the negroes from reading the abolition documents sent to the slave States, which were incitements to insurrection. The course which legislation took after 1831 has led many Northern writers to infer that the anti-slavery agitation was the cause of slaves being treated more inhumanly than before. In so far as the withholding of privileges of education and association was a cruelty they are right; but they are wrong when they have assumed that
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1 The Sunny South, Ingraham, pp. 59,143.
2 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. pp. 94 and 131.
3 Stroud's Slave Laws, p. 138 et seq.; Goodell's American Slave Code, p. 20.

more positive brutality prevailed. A careful examination of the slavery literature will hardly fail to lead to the conclusion that the flood of light which the abolitionists threw upon the practice influenced the slave-owners to mitigate its most cruel features.1 The thesis that slavery is a positive good began to be maintained after 1831, but no amount of arrogant assertion could prevent the advocates of slavery from being put on the defensive. Their earnest endeavors to convince Northern and foreign visitors of the benefits of the system show their appreciation of the fact that it was under the ban of the civilized world; and this very necessity of justifying their peculiar institution made them desirous of suppressing, as far as possible, those features of it which they admitted to be evil.

The ideas about the education of negroes were not everywhere alike, and there were other defences of their being kept in ignorance than the one which I have mentioned. A Georgia rice and cotton planter said 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." 2 The Georgia gentleman was only partly right. A mass of advertisements of slaves for sale shows that knowledge made them more valuable, although it
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1 See, for example, Baltimore American, quoted in Slavery and Color, W. Chambers, p. 173. Seward made a visit to Culpepper Court-house and wrote his wife, December 14th, 1857: "It is quite manifest that the long debate about slavery has made a deep impression on the minds and hearts of the more refined and generous portion of the families in Virginia. The word 'slaves' is seldom used. They are 'servants,' 'hands.' They are treated with kindness, and they appear clean, tidy, and comfortable. I happened to fall in upon a husking frolic on Mr. Pendleton's plantation, and it was indeed a merry and noisy scene. My visit was very pleasant. Mrs. Pendleton is a lady you would respect and love. She is sad with cares and responsibilities which she has too much conscientiousness to cast off."—Life of Seward, vol. ii. p. 331.
2 Kemble, p. 9.

is also true that it made them more dangerous.1 The problem of the master was to impart sufficient knowledge to make the slave useful without making him restless.2

Chancellor Harper, in defending the law of South Carolina, reasoned that the slaves had to work during the day with their hands, and in their intervals of leisure few cared to read for amusement or instruction. "Of the many slaves," he writes," whom I have known capable of reading, I have never known one to read anything but the Bible, and this task they impose on themselves as matter of duty;" but this is an inefficient method of religious instruction, for "their comprehension is defective, and the employment is to them an unusual and laborious one.'3 Another South Carolina judge, of equal prominence, took an entirely different view. He advocated the repeal of the law which forbade the instruction of the slaves. "When we reflect as Christians," he writes, " how can we justify it that a slave is not to be permitted to read the Bible? It is in vain to say there is danger in it. The best slaves in the State are those who can and do read the Scriptures. Again, who is it that teach your slaves to read? It generally is done by the children of the owners. Who would tolerate an indictment against his son or daughter for teaching a favorite slave to read? Such laws look to me as rather cowardly."4 In spite of the law, then, house-servants were frequently taught to read.5 Field hands, on the contrary, remained in gross ignorance, even where there were no prohibitory statutes. In Maryland the teaching of slaves was not forbidden by law,6 yet an apologist of slavery admits that as a general thing they were not taught to read in that State.7 Frederick Douglass
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1 See Despotism in America, Richard Hildreth, p. 63; also Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 82.
2 See Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 61.
3 Pro-slavery Argument, p. 36.
4 Judge J. B. O'Neall, De Bow's Resources, vol. ii. p. 269.
5 See, for example, Memorials of a Southern Planter, Smedes, p. 79. 6The Negro in Maryland, Brackett, p. 197.
7 Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stearns, p. 86.

relates that he had to teach his fellow-slaves on the plantation by stealth, and that when the secret was discovered his school was broken up; he was told, moreover, that if he were striving to be another Nat Turner he would very speedily meet that negro's fate.1 Douglass himself, while house servant in his boyhood to a Baltimore lady, had been taught to read by his mistress; but he relates that, although he was eager to learn, and his teacher was proud of her pupil's rapid progress, the master, when he came to hear of this instruction, peremptorily forbade further lessons, because it was thought learning would spoil the best negro in the world by making him disconsolate and unhappy.2

And there were exceptions even to the crass ignorance of field hands. Olmsted visited a Mississippi plantation where all the negroes knew how to read: they had been taught by one of their number, and with the permission of the owner. They were well fed, and did good, honest work. The master was growing rich from the fruits of their labor, and, though illiterate himself, was proud of his instructed and religious slaves.3

Closely allied with the subject of education is that of religious nurture. It must be borne in mind that the Southern people were very pious, and held strictly to the orthodox faith. Liberal religious movements made no headway among them. If anything were needed to make the names of Garrison and Parker more opprobrious in the South, it
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1 Life of Fred. Douglass, p. 105.
2 Ibid., p. 70. Sarah Grimke received a severe rebuke for teaching her little negro maid to read. The Sisters Grimke, Birney, p. 12. "Slavery and knowledge cannot live together. To enlighten the slave is to break his chain. . . . He cannot be left to read in an enlightened age without endangering his master; for what can he read which will not give at least some hint of his wrongs? Should his eye chance to fall on the Declaration of Independence, how would the truth glare on him 'that all men are born free and equal?'"—Channing on Slavery, p.
3 Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 70.

was that they were reproached with being infidels.1 The practice of giving religious instruction to the slaves varied greatly, according to the temper of the master. Bishop Polk, of Louisiana, who owned four hundred slaves, was very careful about their religious training. They were baptized and taught the catechism; at a proper age many of them were confirmed; marriages were solemnized according to the ritual of the Episcopal Church. The influence of the bishop among the church people of his diocese was beneficial.2 Other masters, from indolence, paid little attention to the matter, while still others discouraged religious instruction, believing it to be dangerous. Religious exercises among the slaves, however, were rarely forbidden.3 It was the opinion of Fanny Kemble that the systematic preaching to the negroes, common in her neighborhood, was largely due to the exposure in the abolition literature of former neglect. Sometimes the slaves of an estate were preached to by one of their own number, or by one from a neighboring plantation. After the day of Nat Turner, it was customary at these meetings to have white men present, and in some States this was required by law. There were also legal restrictions in regard to negroes assembling at night for worship. Free blacks, who were itinerant preachers, were everywhere frowned upon, and frequently prevented from pursuing their calling.

There was a strong feeling that the religious instruction should be given by white preachers. Many of these moved in the same sphere of society as the slave-holders, and practically all of them had the feelings of the dominant class. "Servants, obey in all things your masters," was their favorite text, and the slaves were solemnly enjoined to be satisfied with their lot on earth; though the conditions were
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1 In regard to Garrison, see his Life, vol. iii. p. 374.
2 See note, p. 213, vol. ii. Cotton Kingdom.
3 Ibid., p. 222; see also Promenade en Amerique, Ampere, tome ii. p. 144.

often hard, they were assured that if they remained faithful and steadfast, their reward hereafter would be exceeding great.1 Following the teaching of the fathers of the church, they took pains to impress upon the slaves that while they suffered from the fall of Adam, they labored likewise under the curse of Canaan; that to this were due their black skin and hard hands; that these were manifestations of God's displeasure, and pointed them out as proper subjects of slavery.'

The slaves were fond of religious exercises. Even the arid discourses of the white clergymen were a relief from their monotonous daily toil, while to attend upon the exhortations of one of their own color gave unalloyed delight. Yet there did not seem to be in the minds of the slaves any necessary connection between religion and morality. An entire lack of chastity among the women, and an entire lack of honesty among the men, did not prevent their joining the church and becoming, in the estimation of their fellow-slaves, exemplary Christians. It is obvious that if the white preachers inculcated these virtues, such preaching, when accompanied with the averment that slavery was a necessary relation between the blacks and the whites, must be without effect; for to the slaves an absolute condition of the system seemed to be that the labor of the man and the person of the woman belonged to the master. No moralist would undertake to preach honesty to men who did not
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1 A ragged old negro whom Olmsted met in Mississippi showed that such preaching had taken root by discoursing thus: "Rough fare's good enough for dis world. . . . Dis world ain't nothin'; dis is hell, dis is hell to what's a-comin' arter.... I reckon de Lord has 'cepted of me, and I 'specs I shall be saved, dough I don't look much like it. . . . De Lord am my rock, and he shall not perwail over me; I will lie down in green pastures and take up my bed in hell, yet will not his mercy circumwent me." —Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 90.
2 Kemble, p. 57; Life of Frederick Douglass, p. 155. A curious yet characteristic catechism for slaves was published in the Southern Episcopalian, and cited in the New York Weekly Tribune, June 10th, 1854.

own their labor, nor chastity to women who did not own their bodies. This was appreciated by Southern reasoners. Chancellor Harper argued that unchastity among female slaves was not a vice or a crime, but only a weakness; and that theft by a negro was not a crime, but only a vice.1

It is easy to sum up the intellectual and moral condition of the vast portion of the slaves; they were in a state of dismal ignorance and moral darkness.2 If some travellers and novelists have represented slavery in a different light from that in which it is here presented, it is because they have dwelt upon it as seen in the least painful aspect. The household servants were different in all respects from the field hands. They were naturally brighter, and effort was made to train them; they were better fed and clothed, and their close contact with white people, owing to the imitative faculty of the race, was an education in itself. A common picture in literature is the joyful welcome given the master and mistress on their return from a journey by the troops of house-servants, and that such scenes were of frequent occurrence is undoubted. That a breach in the custom was unwelcome is well illustrated by a master who gave his servants a cruel beating because on coming home he was not met by demonstrations of joy and professions of attachment.3 Olmsted saw some of these welcomes that came from the heart; they were greetings from the house-slaves; the field hands, however, seemed indifferent; "barely touched their tattered hats and grinned."4 "The slaves in a family," said Henry Clay, "are treated with all the kindness that the children of the family receive;"5 and it is General Sherman’s
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1 Pro-slavery Argument, pp. 39 and 43. See instance related by Lyell, Second Visit, vol. i. p. 272.
2 "The field-hand negro is, on an average, a very poor and very bad creature. ... He seems to be but an imperfect man, incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized manner."—Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 339.
3 Slavery as It Is, Theo. D. Weld, p. 129.
4 A Journey in the Back Country, Olmsted, p. 286.
5 Speech on Compromise Measures, February 6th, 1850.

recollection that" the family servants were treated as well as the average hired servants of to-day."1 That these remarks were in a measure true of some houses in the South cannot be denied, but there is abundant testimony to show that these statements by no means represent the average condition of household slaves.2 This is what we should expect, for the relation suggested by Clay was an inherent impossibility, and the assertion of General Sherman is untenable in view of the fact that the servant of to-day has a check upon the master in his privilege of quitting the service.

For the sake, however, of putting this aspect of slavery in its fairest light, I am glad to refer to the observations of two English travellers. Buckingham thought that the condition of the "slaves of the household was quite as comfortable as that of servants in the middle ranks of life in England. They are generally well-fed, well-dressed, attentive, orderly, respectful, and easy to be governed, but more by kindness than by severity.'3 Sir Charles Lyell was of the opinion that the house-slaves had many advantages "over the white race in the same rank of life in Europe." 4 A witty English novelist, struck with the fact that, under the system, a good cook or an honest butler could not be tempted away by an offer of higher wages, said that negro slavery in America was a charming domestic institution.

The existence of mulattoes, quadroons, and of slaves fairer still than these, calls attention to the fact of the mixture of the white and negro races. This union was between the white man and the negress.5 The giving birth to a colored child by a white woman was almost unknown; the
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1 North American Review, October, 1888.
2 See A Journey in the Back Country, Olmsted, p. 288.
3 The Slave States of America, Buckingham, vol. i. p. 131.
4 Second Visit, Sir Charles Lyell, vol. i. p. 263; see also Homes of the New World, F. Bremer, vol. i. p. 277.
5 "The tell-tale faces of children, glowing with their master's blood, but doomed for their mother's skin to slavery."—Sumner's speech on the Barbarism of Slavery.

bringing into the world of children fairer than herself by the female slave was a common thing, and was evidence that the ownership of her person by her master was not merely a theoretical right. While the Southerners frequently charged that amalgamation of the two races was the aim of the Northern abolitionists, to an impartial judge it was apparent that where the negro was free, no danger existed of a mixture of blood. The reason for this did not escape the keen observation of De Tocqueville. "Among the Americans of the Southern States," he writes, "nature, sometimes, reasserting her rights, re-establishes for a moment equality between the whites and the blacks. At the North, pride restrains the most imperious of human passions. The Northern man would perhaps consent to make the negress the transient companion of his pleasure if the legislators had declared that she could never aspire to share legitimately his bed; but as she may legally become his wife, he shrinks from her with a kind of horror."1

The lack of chaste sentiment among the female slaves is exhibited by their yielding without objection, except in isolated cases, to the passion of their master. Indeed, the idea of the superiority of the white race was so universally admitted that the negress felt only pride at bearing offspring that had an admixture of the blood of the ruling class. Such children, on account of their greater capacity, and because in many cases the master would look after his own progeny, were frequently destined for house-servants; thus their lot might be easier than their mothers' had been. So loose was the tie of marriage among the slaves, that the negro husband felt little or no displeasure when the fancy of the master chanced to light upon his wife. One finds instances, however, scattered through the abolition literature, of the black resenting these intrusions upon his family
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1 De la Democratic en Amerique, De Tocqueville, vol. ii. p. 308. It is a certain fact that since the negroes have become free, amalgamation has nearly ceased at the South.

by killing the offending white, but such cases are rare. If, indeed, the desire to revenge the injury had been common, the negro's feelings would have been held in check by the certainty of punishment; for when such murders were committed, execution was prompt, generally according to lynch law, and the offender was occasionally burned at the stake.

The practice of gentlemen seeking illicit pleasure among the slaves of their households and estates introduced into the best society of the South a discordant element which one cannot contemplate without feeling profound pity for the suffering of many noble and refined women whose lot was cast in a country where such a system prevailed. A planter's wife is only "the chief slave of a harem," declared, in the bitterness of her heart, the wife of a lordly slaveholder.1 "We Southern ladies are complimented with the name of wives," said a sister of President Madison, " but we are only the mistresses of seraglios."2 Harriet Martineau wrote that in the Southwestern States "most heartrending disclosures were made to me by the ladies, heads of families, of the state of society, and of their own intolerable sufferings in it." 3 Madison avowed to her that there was great licentiousness on the Virginia plantations, "and that it was understood that the female slaves were to become mothers at fifteen."4 It had become a proverb and a byword that "the noblest blood of Virginia runs in the veins of slaves."5 Fanny Kemble writes that almost every Southern planter admitted one or several of his female slaves to the close intimacy of his bed, and had a "family more or less numerous of illegitimate colored children.”6 A planter told Olmsted: "There is not a likely-looking black girl in this State that is not the concubine of a white man. There is not an old plantation in which the grand
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1 Society in America, Martineau, vol. ii. p. 118.
2 Goodell's American Slave Code, p. 111.
3 Society in America, vol. i. p. 304.
4 Ibid., vol. ii. p. 118.
5 Goodell, p. 84.
6 Kemble, pp. 15 and 23; see also p. 140.

children of the owner are not whipped in the field by his overseer."1

That attractiveness of form and feature which arose from the mixture of bloods increased in a marked degree the selling value of female slaves. A number of cases are cited in the anti-slavery books where comely mulattoes and beautiful quadroons were sold for mistresses; and while unfounded suspicions might sometimes be asserted as positive facts, no one, knowing the system of slavery and understanding human nature, can doubt that many such transactions must have taken place. "I have," writes General Sherman, "attended the auction sales of slaves in the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel [New Orleans]. ... I have seen young girls in new calico dresses, inspected by men buyers as critically as would be a horse by a purchaser— eyes, hair, teeth, limbs and muscles—and have seen spirited bidding for a wench of handsome form and figure by men of respectable standing."2 A letter of slave-dealers, which was widely circulated in anti-slavery publications, was a bald admission of this feature of the traffic. A free negro woman in New York interested some humane people in the fate of her daughter, a beautiful young quadroon girl who was held for sale by a firm in Alexandria, Virginia. With a view of raising the money for the purchase of this slave, they asked what was her price. The slave-dealers replied, "We cannot afford to sell the girl Emily for less than eighteen hundred dollars . . .We have two or three offers for Emily from gentlemen from the South. She is said to be the finest looking woman in this country."3 Harriet Martineau reports a circumstance which exemplifies most pointedly this feature of slavery. "A Southern lady, of fair reputation
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1 Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 308.
2 North American Review, October, 1888.
3 Letter of Bruin and Hill, cited in New York Independent from the Cleveland Democrat, January, 1850. It may be found in Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 169.

for refinement and cultivation, told a story of which a favorite slave, a very pretty mulatto girl, was the heroine. A young man came to stay at her house and fell in love with the girl. 'She came to me,' said the lady, 'for protection, which I gave her.' The young man went away, but after some weeks he returned, saying he was so much in love with the girl that he could not live without her. 'I pitied the young man,' concluded the lady, 'so I sold the girl to him for fifteen hundred dollars.'"1

This phase of the morals of slavery may be best studied at New Orleans. The occupation of this city by three distinct nationalities had given it a cosmopolitan air such as was seen in no other city of the country before the war. The graceful qualities of the Latin race were blended with the manly virtues of the Anglo-Saxon stock. The city was a centre of wealth, and the abode of refinement, elegance, and luxury.' The Spanish and French mixed their blood freely with the negroes, and the result at New Orleans was the production of beautiful quadroons and octoroons which reached their highest type in the female sex. Such girls were frequently sent to Paris to be educated. They were generally healthy in appearance, and often very handsome; they were remarked for a graceful and elegant carriage, and showed exquisite taste in dress; their manners were refined; in short, they were accomplished young women who would, perhaps, have been fitted for the highest society in the land, had it not been for the taint of African blood. They could not marry with a white man; paying the universal homage to the superiority of the Caucasian race,
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1 Society in America, vol. ii. p. 123.

they would not marry a man who had negro blood in his veins. They became, therefore, the mistresses of the wealthy curled darlings of New Orleans. These relations were not entered into blindly; they were the result of systematic arrangement. The young man who fancied the young woman must have the consent of her mother, who was a free person, and who in youth had been placed in like manner. He must have means to provide for the girl and her children, and must agree to settle a certain amount on her when he should leave her and take to himself a lawful wife. All the conditions being satisfactory, the pair lived together in an establishment as husband and wife. The young man led a dual life, frequenting the quadroon society with his mistress, and moving likewise in the best society of New Orleans with his parents and friends. Such connections lasted sometimes for life, but more frequently the marriage of the gentlemen broke them off. The girls that resulted from the union were sometimes sent permanently abroad, where their color did not prevent them from leading reputable lives; but as a general rule they continued in the same rank of life as their mothers, and were destined to a like fate.1

That the evil here referred to prevailed throughout the South to any great extent was sometimes denied.2 The defenders of Southern institutions could point to the observations of two unprejudiced travellers to bear them out in this denial. De Tocqueville testified that mulattoes were far from numerous in the United States;3 and it is true that the proportion of them was much smaller than in French, Spanish, or Portuguese colonies where slavery had existed or still continued in operation. Sir Charles Lyell was told that mulattoes did not constitute more than two and one-half per
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1 For a complete account of this peculiar state of society, see Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 302, and Society in America, vol. ii. p. 116.
2 See denial of Senator Hammond, Pro-slavery Argument, p. 118.
3 De la Democratic en Amerique, vol. ii. p. 331.

cent of the population, which he was quite ready to believe, and from this he drew a conclusion very favorable to the morals of the Southern States. He writes: "If the statistics of the illegitimate children of the whites born here could be compared with those in Great Britain, it might lead to conclusions by no means favorable to the free country. Here (i. e., in the Southern States) there is no possibility of concealment; the color of the child stamps upon him the mark of bastardy, and transmits it to great-grandchildren born in lawful wedlock; whereas, if in Europe there was some mark or indelible stain betraying all the delinquencies and frailties, not only of parents, but of ancestors for three or four generations back, what unexpected disclosures should we not witness!" 1

De Tocqueville and Lyell, however, wrote before any count was taken of mulattoes in our decennial census.2 Such an enumeration was first made in 1850, and a comparison of the figures of 1850 and 1860 shows that the mixture of blood was greater than De Tocqueville and Lyell imagined, while yet it did not reach the proportions that might be supposed from many statements occurring in the abolition literature. It must be understood that, as the mulatto is the product of a union between the white and the black, the term, as used in the census reports, was intended to comprise those having a mixture of white blood from one-half to seven-eighths, but not designed to cover the issue of connections between mulattoes and blacks where there would be a preponderance of African blood. In the slave States, in 1850, ten per cent, of the colored people were mulattoes, and the proportion was twelve per cent, in I860.3
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1 The Second Visit to the United States, vol. i. p. 271.
2 De Tocqueville travelled in this country in 1831-33, and Lyell made his second visit in 1845-46. Proportion. 1850. 1860. I860. 1860. 3Blacks 3,093,605 3,697,274 89.86 87.70
Mulattoes 348,895 518,360 10.14 12.30
Total colored population, 3,442,500 4,215,634

The superintendent of the census made a fair calculation from the census returns that the total births of mulattoes in the whole country from 1850 to 1860 were 273,000. More than six-sevenths of these must have been born in the South. Of every hundred births of colored infants in the United States, seventeen were mulattoes, of whom fifteen were born in the slave States; these must have been, for the most part, the issue of white men and female slaves.1

Among the Southern apologists for slavery were men of great candor, who admitted the evil which we have considered. Such were Chancellor Harper and W. Gilmore Simms; and they excused it on the ground that, as irregular sexual indulgence had contributed to the misery and degradation of man in all nations, ages, and under all religions, its existence at the South was not due to slavery, but proceeded from man's unbridled passion, whose effects were equally baneful at the North and in Europe.2 When Seward was
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1 The historian must be careful not to make any radical deductions from these census figures. The count of mulattoes was made in 1850, 1860, and 1870. The figures for 1870 show that in the old slave States the number of mulattoes had decreased from 1860. As the war had intervened, this is not satisfactory evidence that the mixing of races had decreased with the emancipation of the slaves; but that fact is so universally acknowledged that no statistics are needed to sustain it. Why the count of the mulattoes was abandoned in 1880 is explained by a letter of Francis A. Walker, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was superintendent of the census for 1870 and 1880. He writes, December 20th, 1889: "The reason for the omission of the class mulatto from the census of 1880 was found in the conviction that the returns had always been inaccurate in this particular, and were becoming increasingly so as each successive generation produced a larger admixture of blood. Not one person in ten makes the faintest discrimination between three negroes who are respectively five-eighths, three-fourths, and seven-eighths black. Most persons fail to make the distinction between the whole and the three-fourths of color. Every ten years the admixture becomes more complicated, while there is even less interest than formerly in observing and preserving the distinctions resulting."
2 See Pro-slavery Argument, pp. 40 and 230. See also, in this connection, Lecky's History of Morals, vol. ii. p. 282.

at Richmond he had an interview with the governor of Virginia, in which the latter spoke of the danger of amalgamation at the North; "and when," as Seward himself reports the conversation, "I told him that commerce of the races was less frequent there than in the South, he forgot the question and extolled that commerce as freeing the white race from habits of licentiousness." 1 The discussion of this defence is the part of the moralist, not of the historian. Our concern is simply with the facts. The most scathing review of this practice may be found in Harriet Martineau's chapter on the " Morals of Slavery," which occurs in " Society in America." Some notion of this part of her book may be had when I mention that all the references but one which have been made to it in the present consideration of the matter were drawn from this chapter.2 The treatise is admirably written. It is not that of a one-sided agitator who searches only for facts which will square with his theory, but it is the work of a student of social science who has gathered facts with care, and only drawn legitimate deductions. It was this chapter that brought down on the author that indiscriminate abuse in which the critics vied with one another in making ungenerous allusions to her infirmity of deafness, and insulting references to her maidenhood; for it was an offence to put the finger upon the plague-spot.

One of the authoritative apologists of slavery admits that Miss Martineau was correct. The chapter on "Morals of Slavery," writes W. Gilmore Simms, "is painful because it is full of truth. ... It gives a collection of statements, which are, no doubt, in too many cases founded upon facts, of the illicit and foul conduct of some among us who make their slaves the victims and the instruments alike of the most licentious passions... . We do not quarrel with Miss Martineau
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1 Life of W. H. Seward, vol. i. p. 777.
2 The one on p. 336, to vol. i.; this chapter occurs in vol ii.

for this chapter. The truth—though it is not all truth—is quite enough to sustain her and it."1

The child is father of the man. What effect had the institution of slavery on the bringing-up of children? One aspect is best described by Jefferson. "The whole commerce between master and slave," he writes, " is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it. . . . The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.'2 "Everybody in the South," wrote Fred. Douglass, "seemed to want the privilege of whipping somebody else." 3

The close and habitual association of children with slaves was objectionable on account of the lascivious imagination and gross talk of the negroes. It was a companionship mutually agreeable, but especially dangerous; for, as chastity was not a restraint upon the blacks, their conversation lacked decency. A Southern merchant told Olmsted that he begged his brother, who was a planter, to send his children North to school, for "he might as well have them educated in a brothel as in the way they were growing up." 4 Fortunately, the custom prevailed for wealthy people at the South to send their daughters and sons away to school and to college, and they generally went to the North. Girls seem to have gone through this corruption scatheless, but boys suffered from the early contact with licentiousness, both physically and morally.5
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1 Pro-slavery Argument, p. 228.
2 Notes on Virginia, Works, vol. viii. p. 403.
3 Life, p. 31.
4 Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 230.
5 See ibid., vol. i. p. 222; vol. ii. p. 229; Martineau's chapter on Morals of Slavery, p. 128.

I have spoken of the effect of slavery on the slaves and slave-holders, but there was another large class in the South that must be considered. The poor whites were free; they had the political privileges of the planters, but their material want was almost as bad, and their lack of education almost as marked as that of the negroes. Yet they asserted the aristocracy of color more arrogantly than did the rich; it was their one claim to superiority, and they hugged closely the race distinction. Driven off the fertile lands by the encroachments of the planter, or prevented from occupying the virgin soil by the outbidding of the wealthy, they farmed the worn-out lands and gained a miserable and precarious subsistence. Compared with laborers on the farms or in the workshops of the North, they were in material things abjectly poor; intellectually they were utterly ignorant; morally their condition was one of grovelling baseness.1 Nor did this proceed entirely from the fact that they were forced to work the barren, unproductive lands. Olmsted drew an instructive comparison between the poor whites of Georgia and the inhabitants of Cape Cod. In all New England the sterility of the soil of the cape was a proverb; yet this careful observer declared that "there is hardly a poor woman's cow on the cape that is not better housed and more comfortably provided for than a majority of the white people of Georgia." He has shrewdly appreciated the idiosyncrasies common to the people of Cape Cod and the "sandhillers" and "crackers" of Georgia. "In both," he writes, "there is frankness, boldness, and simplicity; but in the one it is associated with intelligence, discretion, and an expansion of the mind, resulting from considerable education; in the other, with ignorance, improvidence, laziness, and the prejudices of narrow minds."2
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1 For the contrast of illiteracy and common intelligence North and South, see Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 331.
2 Olmsted's Seaboard Slave States, p. 538. The difference is thoroughly discussed, and the inducements to a seafaring and fishing life are considered.

The poor whites of the South looked on the prosperity of the slave-holding lord with rank and sullen envy; his trappings contrasted painfully with their want of comforts, yet he knew so well how to play upon their contempt for the negro, and to make it appear that his and their interests were identical, that when election-day came the whites, who were without money and without slaves, did the bidding of the lord of the plantation. When Southern interests were in danger, it was the poor whites who voted for their preservation. The slave-holders, and the members of that society which clustered round them, took the offices. It was extremely rare that a man who had ever labored with his hands was sent to Congress from the South, or chosen to one of the prominent positions in the State.

The political system of the South was an oligarchy under the republican form. The slave-holders were in a very disproportionate minority in every State.1 "Two hundred thousand men with pure white skins in South Carolina," said Broderick to the senators, "are now degraded and despised by thirty thousand aristocratic slave-holders." 2 The governor of South Carolina was in favor of doing something to elevate their poor, but feared they were " hopelessly doomed to ignorance, poverty, and crime."3 In 1850 there were 347,525 slave-holders,4 who with their families may have numbered two millions.5 The total white population of the slave States was 6,125,000, so that less than one-third of the white people of the South could possibly have derived any benefit from the institution of slavery. In other words, this imperial domain, covering more square miles than there were in the free States, was given up to two million people;
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1 Seward's Works, vol. i. p. 74.
2 March 22d, 1858, Congressional Globe, vol. xxxvii. p. 193.
3 Olmsted's Seaboard Slave States, p. 505.
4 Census Report for 1850. See Life of Garrison, vol. iii. p. 272. 6
5 The superintendent of the census; see Seward's speech, October, 1855, Works, vol. iv. p. 237; Henry Wilson's speech, July 2d, 1856, Congressional Globe, vol. xxxiii. p. 793.

and more than seven millions, bond and free,1 labored for them or were subservient to their interests. Yet these figures by no means represent the exclusive character of the slave-holding oligarchy. In the enumeration of slave-holders were included many men from the laboring class who by unusual industry or economy had become possessed of one slave or perhaps more, but who politically and socially belonged only to the class from which they had sprung.2 Of the large planters owning more than fifty slaves, whose elegance, luxury, and hospitality are recited in tales of travellers, over whose estates and lives has shone the lustre of romance and poetry, there were less than eight thousand.3 They were the true centre of the oligarchy. Around them clustered the few educated people of the country, also the best society of the cities, which was composed of merchants, doctors, lawyers, and politicians, and was seen to the best advantage in New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond. Including all these, the total number must have been small; but it was for them that slavery existed. What has been here adduced is sufficient to show that slavery was certainly not for the advantage of the negro. No one seriously maintained that there were any benefits in the system for the poor whites; since it degraded labor, and therefore degraded the white man who had to work with his hands.4 It is one of the striking facts of our history that these despised people fought bravely and endured much for a cause adverse to
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1 The total population of the slave States for 1850 was 9,569,540—composed of whites, free colored, and slaves.
2 The holders of one slave were 68,820; of more than one and less than five, 105,683—more than half of the whole number, which was 347,525.
3 De Bow's U. S. Census Report; Olmsted's Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 20.
4 For a full account of the poor whites, see Olmsted's Seaboard Slave States, pp. 505,508,514; Kemble, pp. 76 and 146; Cotton Kingdom, vol. i. p. 22; Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 185; Helper's Impending Crisis, passim.

their own interests, following Lee and Stonewall Jackson with a devotion that called to mind the deeds of a more heroic age.

It was then for a small aristocracy that slavery continued to be, and it is among them that we must look for its advantages. An apologist of the institution, who was himself one of the select few, maintained that by the existence of slavery they had greater leisure for intellectual pursuits and better means of attaining a liberal education. "It is better," he declares," that a part [of the community] should be fully and highly cultivated, and the rest utterly ignorant."1

The South did, indeed, produce good lawyers and able politicians. Their training was excellent. The sons of the wealthy almost always went to college, and there they began to acquire the knack at public speaking which seemed natural to the Southerner. The political life of their State was early opened to them, and by the time the promising young men were sent to Congress they had learned experience and adroitness in public affairs. If they made their mark in the national House or the Senate, they were kept there, and each year added to their usefulness and influence.2 The aspirants for political honors being almost wholly from the small privileged class, it was not difficult to provide places for those eminently fitted. Moreover, the men who wielded the power were convinced that continuance
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1 Chancellor Harper, Pro-slavery Argument, p. 35. "In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life; that is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air as to build either the one or the other except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand."—Senator Hammond, of South Carolina, Senate, March 4th, 1858, Speeches and Letters, p. 318.
2 This custom is well described in Lowell's Political Essays, p. 135.

in office was the proper reward of those who had shown capacity and honesty. The absurd practice which prevailed at the North, of rotating their representatives in the lower house in order to make room for as many as possible of those who had political claims, never gained foothold in the South. This was, indeed, one reason why the South won advantages over the North, in spite of its inferior numerical strength.1

It is not surprising that the Southerners shone in the political sphere. Their intellect tended naturally to public affairs; they had the talent and leisure for politics which a landed aristocracy is apt to have under a representative government; and when the slavery question assumed importance at Washington, their concern for shaping the course of national legislation became a passion, and seemed necessary for the preservation of their order. But it was only in law and politics that the South was eminent. She did not give birth to a poet, nor to a philosopher after Jefferson, and his philosophy she rejected. She could lay claim only to an occasional scientist, but to no great historian; none of her novelists or essayists who wrote before the war has the next generation cared to read.2 Whoever, thinking of the opportunities for culture in the ancient world given by the existence of slavery, seeks in the Southern community a trace even of that intellectual and artistic development which was the glory of Athens, will look in vain. Had the other causes existed, the sparse settlements of the South, the lack of a compact social body,3 made utterly
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1 This superiority is boastfully asserted in De Bow's Resources, vol. iii. p. 63.
2 A partial exception must be made of W. Gilmore Simms. A new edition of his books was published in 1882, and his revolutionary tales are still read by schoolboys, although to nothing like the extent that Cooper's novels are read. "The South has no literature," said Rufus Choate, Recollections, Parker, p. 265.
3 In 1852, Mrs. Davis rejoiced in " our mail twice a week." Memoir of Jefferson Davis, vol. i. p. 475.

impossible such results as mark Grecian civilization. The physical and economic conditions of the South presented insuperable obstacles to any full development of university education. While efforts were made to promote the establishment of colleges, the higher fields of scientific and literary research were not cultivated with eminent success; for the true scientific spirit could never have free play in a community where one subject of investigation of all-pervading influence must remain a closed book.

When one thinks of the varied forms under which the intellect of New England displayed itself, and remembers the brilliant achievements there in the mind's domain which illumine the generation before the war, he cannot but feel that the superiority of the South in politics, after the great Virginia statesman had left the stage, was held at too great cost, if it was maintained at the sacrifice of a many-sided development such as took place at the North.

The great majority of the slave-holders lacked even ordinary culture. Nothing illustrates this better than the experience of Olmsted while on a horseback journey of three months, from the banks of the Mississippi to the banks of the James. In the rural districts of that country there were no inns. The traveller's stopping-places for the night were the houses of the farmers along his route, many of whom made it a practice to accommodate strangers, and were willing to accept in payment for their trouble the price which would have been demanded by an inn-keeper. A majority of Olmsted's hosts in this journey were slaveholders, and a considerable proportion cotton-planters. He observed that certain symbols of civilization were wanting. "From the banks of the Mississippi to the banks of the James," he writes, " I did not (that I remember) see, except perhaps in one or two towns, a thermometer, nor a book of Shakespeare, nor a piano-forte or sheet of music, nor the light of a Carcel or other good centre-table or reading lamp, nor an engraving or copy of any kind of a work of art of the slightest merit."1
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1 Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. p. 285. This whole chapter," The Condition and Character of the Privileged Classes of the South," should be read by every one who is interested in the social state of that section before the war. See also Despotism in America, Hildreth, p. 147.
Lieber wrote from Columbia to Hillard, May, 1851: "Every son of a fool here is a great statesman, meditating on the relations of State sovereignty to the United States government; but as to roads, common schools, glass in the windows, food besides salt meat, as to cheerily joining in the general chorus of progress, what is that for Don Ranudo de Colobrados, of South Carolina—out at elbows, to be sure; but then, what of that ?"—Life and Letters, p. 254.


Source: Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States; from the compromise of 1850 to the final restoration of home rule at the south in 1877, v.1. New York: Macmillan, 1910 [c1892].