The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

ANSWER:—Their knowledge on this point must have been derived, either from the slaveholders and overseers themselves, or from the slaves, or from their own observation. If from the slaveholders, their testimony has already been weighed and found wanting; if they derived it from the slaves, they can hardly be so simple as to suppose that the guest, associate and friend of the master, would be likely to draw from his slaves any other testimony respecting his treatment of them, than such as would please him. The great shrewdness and tact exhibited by slaves in keeping themselves out of difficulty, when close questioned by strangers as to their treatment, cannot fail to strike every accurate observer. The following remarks of CHIEF JUSTICE HENDERSON, a North Carolina slaveholder, in his decision (in 1830,) in the case of the State versus Charity, 2 Devereaux's North Carolina Reports, 513, illustrate the folly of arguing the good treatment of slaves from their own declarations, while in the power of their masters. In the case above cited, the Chief Justice, in refusing to permit a master to give in evidence, declarations made to him by his slave, says of masters and slaves generally—

"The master has an almost absolute control over the body and mind of his slave. The master's will is the slave's will. All his acts, all his sayings, are made with a view to propitiate his master. His confessions are made, not from a love of truth, not from a sense of duty, not to speak a falsehood, but to please his master—and it is in vain that his master tells him to speak the truth and conceals from him how he wishes the question answered. The slave will ascertain, or, which is the same thing, think that he has ascertained the wishes of his master, and MOULD HIS ANSWER ACCORDINGLY. We therefore more often get the wishes of the master, or the slave's belief of his wishes, than the truth."

The following extract of a letter from the Hon. SETH M. GATES, member elect of the next Congress, furnishes a clue by which to interpret the looks, actions, and protestations of slaves, when in the presence of their masters' guests, and the pains sometimes taken by slaveholders, in teaching their slaves the art of pretending that they are treated well, love their masters, are happy, &c. The letter is dated Leroy, Jan. 4, 1839.

"I have sent your letter to Rev. Joseph M. Sadd, Castile, Genesee county, who resided five years in a slave state, and left, disgusted with slavery. I trust he will give you some facts. I remember one fact, which his wife witnessed. A relative, where she boarded, returning to his plantation after a temporary absence, was not met by his servants with such demonstrations of joy as was their wont. He ordered his horse put out, took down his whip, ordered his servants to the barn, and gave them a most cruel beating, because they did not run out to meet him, and pretend great attachment to him. Mrs. Sadd had overheard the servants agreeing not to go out, before his return, as they said they did not love him—and this led her to watch his conduct to them. This man was a professor of religion!"

If these northern visitors derived their information that the slaves are not cruelly treated from their own observation, it amounts to this, they did not see cruelties inflicted on the slaves. To which we reply, that the preceding pages contain testimony from hundreds of witnesses, who testify that they did see the cruelties whereof they affirm. Besides this, they contain the solemn declarations of scores of slaveholders themselves, in all parts of the slave states, that the slaves are cruelly treated. These declarations are moreover fully corroborated, by the laws of slave states, by a multitude of advertisements in their newspapers, describing runaway slaves, by their scars, brands, gashes, maimings, cropped ears, iron collars, chains, &c. &c.

Truly, after the foregoing array of facts and testimony, and after the objectors' forces have one after another filed off before them, now to march up a phalanx of northern visitors, is to beat a retreat. 'Visitors!' What insight do casual visitors get into the tempers and daily practices of those whom they visit, or of the treatment that their slaves receive at their hands, especially if these visitors are strangers, and from a region where there are no slaves, and which claims to be opposed to slavery? What opportunity has a stranger, and a temporary guest, to learn the every-day habits and caprices of his host? Oh, these northern visitors tell us they have visited scores of families at the south and never saw a master or mistress whip their slaves. Indeed! They have, doubtless, visited hundreds of families at the north—did they ever see, on such occasions, the father or mother whip their children? If so, they must associate with very ill-bred persons. Because well-bred parents do not whip their children in the presence, or within the hearing of their guests are we to infer that they never do it out of their sight and hearing? But perhaps the fact that these visitors do not remember seeing slaveholders strike their slaves, merely proves, that they had so little feeling for them, that though they might be struck every day in their presence, yet as they were only slaves and 'niggers,' it produced no effect upon them; consequently they have no impressions to recall. These visitors have also doubtless rode with scores of slaveholders. Are they quite certain they ever saw them whip their horses? and can they recall the persons, times, places, and circumstances? But even if these visitors regarded the slaves with some kind feelings, when they first went to the south, yet being constantly with their oppressors, seeing them used as articles of property, accustomed to hear them charged with all kinds of misdemeanors, their ears filled with complaints of their laziness, carelessness, insolence, obstinacy, stupidity, thefts, elopements, &c. and at the same time, receiving themselves the most gratifying attentions and caresses from the same persons, who, while they make to them these representations of their slaves, are giving them airings in their coaches, making parties for them, taking them on excursions of pleasure, lavishing upon them their choicest hospitalities, and urging them to protract indefinitely their stay—what more natural than for the flattered guest to admire such hospitable people, catch their spirit, and fully sympathize with their feelings toward their slaves, regarding with increased disgust and aversion those who can habitually tease and worry such loveliness and generosity[[23]]. After the visitor had been in contact with the slave-holding spirit long enough to have imbibed it, (no very tedious process,) a cuff, or even a kick administered to a slave, would not be likely to give him such a shock that his memory would long retain the traces of it. But lest we do these visitors injustice, we will suppose that they carried with them to the south humane feelings for the slave, and that those feelings remained unblunted; still, what opportunity could they have to witness the actual condition of the slaves? They come in contact with the house-servants only, and as a general thing, with none but the select ones of these, the parlor-servants; who generally differ as widely in their appearance and treatment from the cooks and scullions in the kitchen, as parlor furniture does from the kitchen utensils. Certain servants are assigned to the parlor, just as certain articles of furniture are selected for it, to be seen—and it is no less ridiculous to infer that the kitchen scullions are clothed and treated like those servants who wait at the table, and are in the presence of guests, than to infer that the kitchen is set out with sofas, ottomans, piano-fortes, and full-length mirrors, because the parlor is. But the house-slaves are only a fraction of the whole number. The field-hands constitute the great mass of the slaves, and these the visitors rarely get a glimpse at. They are away at their work by day-break, and do not return to their huts till dark. Their huts are commonly at some distance from the master's mansion, and the fields in which they labor, generally much farther, and out of sight. If the visitor traverses the plantation, care is taken that he does not go alone; if he expresses a wish to see it, the horses are saddled, and the master or his son gallops the rounds with him; if he expresses a desire to see the slaves at work, his conductor will know where to take him, and when, and which of them to show; the overseer, too, knows quite too well the part he has to act on such occasions, to shock the uninitiated ears of the visitors with the shrieks of his victims. It is manifest that visitors can see only the least repulsive parts of slavery, inasmuch as it is wholly at the option of the master, what parts to show them; as a matter of necessity, he can see only the outside—and that, like the outside of doorknobs and andirons is furbished up to be looked at. So long as it is human nature to wear the best side out, so long the northern guests of southern slaveholders will see next to nothing of the reality of slavery. Those visitors may still keep up their autumnal migrations to the slave states, and, after a hasty survey of the tinsel hung before the curtain of slavery, without a single glance behind it, and at the paint and varnish that cover up dead men's bones, and while those who have hoaxed them with their smooth stories and white-washed specimens of slavery, are tittering at their gullibility, they return in the spring on the same fool's-errand with their predecessors, retailing their lesson, and mouthing the praises of the masters, and the comforts of the slaves. They now become village umpires in all disputes about the condition of the slaves, and each thence forward ends all controversies with his oracular, "I've seen, and sure I ought to know."

[Footnote [23]": Well saith the Scripture, "A gift blindeth the eyes." The slaves understand this, though the guest may not; they know very well that they have no sympathy to expect from their master's guests; that the good cheer of the "big house," and the attentions shown them, will generally commit them in their master's favor, and against themselves. Messrs. Thome and Kimball, in their late work, state the following fact, in illustration of this feeling among the negro apprentices in Jamaica.

"The governor of one of the islands, shortly after his arrival, dined with one of the wealthiest proprietors. The next day one of the negroes of the estate said to another, "De new gubner been poison'd." "What dat you say?" inquired the other in astonishment, "De gubner been poison'd! Dah, now!—How him poisoned?" "Him eat massa's turtle soup last night," said the shrewd negro. The other took his meaning at once; and his sympathy for the governor was turned into concern for himself, when he perceived that the poison was one from which he was likely to suffer more than his excellency."—Emancipation in the West Indies, p. 334.]

But all northern visitors at the south are not thus easily gulled. Many of them, as the preceding pages show, have too much sense to be caught with chaff.

We may add here, that those classes of visitors whose representations of the treatment of slaves are most influential in moulding the opinions of the free states, are ministers of the gospel, agents of benevolent societies, and teachers who have traveled and temporarily resided in the slave states—classes of persons less likely than any others to witness cruelties, because slaveholders generally take more pains to keep such visitors in ignorance than others, because their vocations would furnish them fewer opportunities for witnessing them, and because they come in contact with a class of society in which fewer atrocities are committed than in any other, and that too, under circumstances which make it almost impossible for them to witness those which are actually committed.