"Those only who have the management of servants, know what the hardening effect of it is upon their own feelings towards them. There is no necessity to dwell on this point, as all owners and managers fully understand it. He who commences to manage them with tenderness and with a willingness to favor them in every way, must be watchful, otherwise he will settle down in indifference, if not severity."
GENERAL WILLIAM H. HARRISON, now of Ohio, son of the late Governor Harrison of Virginia, a slaveholder, while minister from the United States to the Republic of Colombia, wrote a letter to General Simon Bolivar, then President of that Republic, just as he was about assuming despotic power. The letter is dated Bogota, Sept. 22, 1826. The following is an extract.
"From a knowledge of your own disposition and present feelings, your excellency will not be willing to believe that you could ever be brought to an act of tyranny, or even to execute justice with unnecessary rigor. But trust me, sir, there is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature than the exercise of unlimited power. The man, who in the beginning of such a career, might shudder at the idea of taking away the life of a fellow-being, might soon have his conscience so seared by the repetition of crime, that the agonies of his murdered victims might become music to his soul, and the drippings of the scaffold afford blood to swim in. History is full of such excesses."
WILLIAM H. FITZHUGH, Esq. of Virginia, a slaveholder, says,—"Slavery, in its mildest form, is cruel and unnatural; its injurious effects on our morals and habits are mutually felt."
HON. SAMUEL S. NICHOLAS, late Judge of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky, and a slaveholder, in a speech before the legislature of that state, Jan. 1837, says,—
"The deliberate convictions of the most matured consideration I can give the subject, are, that the institution of slavery is a most serious injury to the habits, manners and morals of our white population—that it leads to sloth, indolence, dissipation, and vice."
Dr. THOMAS COOPER, late President of the College of South Carolina, in a note to his edition of the "Institutes of Justinian" page 413, says,—
"All absolute power has a direct tendency, not only to detract from the happiness of the persons who are subject to it, but to DEPRAVE THE GOOD QUALITIES of those who possess it ... the whole history of human nature, in the present and every former age, will justify me in saying that such is the tendency of power on the one hand and slavery on the other."
A South Carolina slaveholder, whose name is with the executive committee of the Am. A.S. Society, says, in a letter, dated April 4, 1838:—
"I think it (slavery) ruinous to the temper and to our spiritual life; it is a thorn in the flesh, for ever and for ever goading us on to say and to do what the Eternal God cannot but be displeased with. I speak from experience, and oh! my desire is to be delivered from it."