“The Frambæsia, Piam, or Yaws, is a contagious disease, communicable by contact among those who greatly neglect cleanliness. It is supposed to be communicable, in a modified form, to the white race, among whom it resembles pseudo syphilis, or some disease of the nose, throat, or larynx. * * *
“Negro-consumption, a disease almost unknown to medical men of the Northern States and of Europe, is also sometimes fearfully prevalent among the slaves. ‘It is of importance,’ says the Doctor, ‘to know the pathognomic signs in its early stages, not only in regard to its treatment, but to detect impositions, as negroes afflicted with this complaint are often for sale; the acceleration of the pulse, on exercise, incapacitates them for labour, as they quickly give out, and have to leave their work. This induces their owners to sell them, although they may not know the cause of their inability to labour. Many of the negroes brought South, for sale, are in the incipient stages of this disease; they are found to be inefficient labourers, and are sold in consequence thereof. The effect of superstition—a firm belief that he is poisoned or conjured—upon the patient’s mind, already in a morbid state (dysæsthesia), and his health affected from hard usage, over-tasking or exposure, want of wholesome food, good clothing, warm, comfortable lodging, with the distressing idea (sometimes) that he is an object of hatred or dislike, both to his master or fellow-servants, and has no one to befriend him, tends directly to generate that erythism of mind which is the essential cause of negro-consumption.’ * * * ‘Remedies should be assisted by removing the original cause of the dissatisfaction or trouble of mind, and by using every means to make the patient comfortable, satisfied, and happy.’”
Longing for home generates a distinct malady, known to physicians as Nostalgia, and there is a suggestive analogy between the treatment commonly employed to cure it and that recommended in this last advice of Dr. Cartwright.
Discipline.—Under the slave system of labour, discipline must always be maintained by physical power. A lady of New York, spending a winter in a Southern city, had a hired slave-servant, who, one day, refused outright to perform some ordinary light domestic duty required of her. On the lady’s gently remonstrating with her, she immediately replied: “You can’t make me do it, and I won’t do it: I aint afeard of you whippin’ me.” The servant was right; the lady could not whip her, and was too tender-hearted to call in a man, or to send her to the guard-house to be whipped, as is the custom with Southern ladies, when their patience is exhausted, under such circumstances. She endeavoured, by kindness and by appeals to the girl’s good sense, to obtain a moral control over her; but, after suffering continual annoyance and inconvenience, and after an intense trial of her feelings, for some time, she was at length obliged to go to her owner, and beg him to come and take her away from the house, on any terms. It was no better than having a lunatic or a mischievous and pilfering monomaniac quartered on her.[20]
But often when courage and physical power, with the strength of the militia force and the army of the United States, if required, at the back of the master, are not wanting, there are a great variety of circumstances that make a resort to punishment inconvenient, if not impossible.
Really well-trained, accomplished, and docile house-servants are seldom to be purchased or hired at the South, though they are found in old wealthy families rather oftener than first-rate English or French servants are at the North. It is, doubtless, a convenience to have even moderately good servants who cannot, at any time of their improved value or your necessity, demand to have their pay increased, or who cannot be drawn away from you by prospect of smaller demands and kinder treatment at your neighbour’s; but I believe few of those who are incessantly murmuring against this healthy operation of God’s good law of supply and demand would be willing to purchase exemption from it, at the price with which the masters and mistresses of the South do. They would pay, to get a certain amount of work done, three or four times as much, to the owner of the best sort of hired slaves, as they do to the commonest, stupidest Irish domestic drudges at the North, though the nominal wages by the week or year, in Virginia, are but little more than in New York.
The number of servants usually found in a Southern family, of any pretension, always amazes a Northern lady. In one that I have visited, there are exactly three negroes to each white, the negroes being employed solely in the house.
(A Southern lady, of an old and wealthy family, who had been for some time visiting a friend of mine in New York, said to her, as she was preparing to return home: “I cannot tell you how much, after being in your house so long, I dread to go home, and to have to take care of our servants again. We have a much smaller family of whites than you, but we have twelve servants, and your two accomplish a great deal more, and do their work a great deal better than our twelve. You think your girls are very stupid, and that they give you much trouble: but it is as nothing. There is hardly one of our servants that can be trusted to do the simplest work without being stood over. If I order a room to be cleaned, or a fire to be made in a distant chamber, I never can be sure I am obeyed unless I go there and see for myself. If I send a girl out to get anything I want for preparing the dinner, she is as likely as not to forget what is wanted, and not to come back till after the time at which dinner should be ready. A hand-organ in the street will draw all my girls out of the house; and while it remains near us I have no more command over them than over so many monkeys. The parade of a military company has sometimes entirely prevented me from having any dinner cooked; and when the servants, standing in the square looking at the soldiers, see my husband coming after them, they only laugh, and run away to the other side, like playful children.[21] And, when I reprimand them, they only say they don’t mean to do anything wrong, or they won’t do it again, all the time laughing as though it was all a joke. They don’t mind it at all. They are just as playful and careless as any wilful child; and they never will do any work if you don’t compel them.”)
The slave employer, if he finds he has been so unfortunate as to hire a sulky servant, who cannot be made to work to his advantage, has no remedy but to solicit from his owner a deduction from the price he has agreed to pay for his labour, on the same ground that one would from a livery-stable keeper, if he had engaged a horse to go a journey, but found that he was not strong or skilful enough to keep him upon the road. But, if the slave is the property of his employer, and becomes “rascally,” the usual remedy is that which the veterinary surgeon recommended when he was called upon for advice how to cure a jibing horse: “Sell him, my lord.” “Rascals” are “sent South” from Virginia, for the cure or alleviation of their complaint, in much greater numbers than consumptives are from the more Northern States.
“How do you manage, then, when a man misbehaves, or is sick?” I have been often asked by Southerners, in discussing this question.