“This poor fellow,” said Kenrick, “shows the effects of the corn-husk punishment; not an unusual one on some plantations. The victim is stretched out on the ground, with hands and feet held down. Dry corn-husks are then lighted, and the burning embers are whipped off with a stick so as to fall in showers of live sparks on the naked back. Such is the ‘patriarchal’ system! Such the tender mercies bestowed on ‘our man-servants and our maid-servants,’ as that artful dodger, Jeff Davis, calls our plantation slaves.”
“And yet,” remarked Vance, “horrible as these things are, how small a part of the wrong of slavery is in the mere physical suffering inflicted!”
“Yes, the crowning outrage is mental and moral.”
“This war,” resumed Vance, “is not sectional, nor geographical, nor, in a party sense, political: it is a war of eternally antagonistic principles,—Belial against Gabriel.”
“I took up a Northern paper to-day,” said Kenrick, “in which the writer pleads the necessity of slavery, because, he says, ‘white men can’t work in the rice-swamps.’ Truly, a staggering argument! The whole rice production of the United States is only worth some four millions of dollars per annum! A single factory in Lowell can beat that. And we are asked to base a national policy on such considerations!”
Here the approach of guests led to a change of topic.
“And how have your affairs prospered?” asked Vance.
“Ah! cousin,” replied Kenrick, “I almost blush to tell you what an experience I’ve had.”
“Not fallen in love, I hope?”
“If it isn’t that, ’t is something very near it. The lady is staying with Miss Tremaine. A Miss Perdita Brown. Onslow took me to see her.”