“Admitting that they are people having their preferences as well as others, and there be a supply, can that love which is the foundation and essence of the marriage state be forced?”
Touching honesty and thrift among the negroes, he says:
“While some discipline their people for every act of theft committed against their interests, they have no care whatever what amount of pilfering and stealing the people carry on among themselves. Hence, in some places, thieves thrive and honest men suffer, until it becomes a practice ‘to keep if you can what is your own, and get all you can besides that is your neighbour’s. Things come to such a pass, that the saying of the negroes is literally true, ‘The people live upon one another.’”
Referring to the evil of intemperance, it is observed:
“Whatever toleration masters use towards ardent spirits in others, they are generally inclined to use none in respect to their servants; and in effecting this reformation, masters and mistresses should set the example; for without example, precepts and persuasions are powerless. Nor can force effect this reformation as surely and perfectly as persuasion—appealing to the character and happiness of the servant himself, the appeal recognizes him in such a manner as to produce self-respect, and it tends to give elevation of conduct and character. I will not dwell upon this point.”
He will not dwell on this point; yet, is it not evident that until this point can be dwelt upon, all effort for the genuine Christianization of the negro race in the South must be ineffectual?
The benefit to the African which is supposed to be incidental to American slavery, is confessedly proportionate to the degree in which he is forced into intercourse with a superior race and made subject to its example. Before I visited the South, I had believed that the advantages accruing from slavery, in this way, far outweighed the occasional cruelties, and other evils incidental to the system. I found, however, the mental and moral condition of the negroes, even in Virginia, and in those towns and districts containing the largest proportion of whites, much lower than I had anticipated; and as soon as I had an opportunity to examine one of the extensive plantations of the interior, although one inherited by its owner, and the home of a large and virtuous white family, I was satisfied that the advantages arising to the blacks from association with their white masters were very inconsiderable, scarcely appreciable, for the great majority of the field-hands. Even the overseer had barely acquaintance enough with the slaves, individually, to call them by name; the owner could not determine if he were addressing one of his own chattels, or whether it was another man’s property, he said, when by chance he came upon a negro off the work. Much less did the slaves have an opportunity to cultivate their minds by intercourse with other white people. Whatever of civilization, and of the forms, customs, and shibboleths of Christianity, they were acquiring by example, and through police restraints, might, it occurred to me, after all, but poorly compensate the effect of the systematic withdrawal from them of all the usual influences which tend to nourish the moral nature and develope the intellectual faculties, in savages as well as in civilized free men.
This doubt, as my Northern friends well know, for I had habitually assumed the opposite, in all previous discussions of the slavery question, was unexpected and painful to me. I resisted it long, and it was not till I had been more than twelve months in the South, with my attention constantly fixed upon the point, that I ceased to suspect that the circumstances which brought me to it were exceptional and deceptive. It grew constantly stronger with every opportunity I had of observing the condition, habits, and character of slaves whom I could believe to present fair examples of the working of the system with the majority of those subject to it upon the large plantations.
The frequency with which the slaves use religious phrases of all kinds, the readiness with which they engage in what are deemed religious exercises, and fall into religious ecstacies, with the crazy, jocular manner in which they often talk of them, are striking and general characteristics. It is not at all uncommon to hear them refer to conversations which they allege, and apparently believe themselves to have had with Christ, the apostles, or the prophets of old, or to account for some of their actions by attributing them to the direct influence of the Holy Spirit, or of the devil. It seems to me that this state of mind is fraught with more danger to their masters than any to which they could possibly have been brought by general and systematic education, and by the unrestricted study of the Bible, even though this involved what is so much dreaded, but which is, I suspect, an inevitable accompaniment of moral elevation, the birth of an ambition to look out for themselves. Grossly ignorant and degraded in mind, with a crude, undefined, and incomplete system of theology and ethics, credulous and excitable, intensely superstitious and fanatical, what better field could a cunning monomaniac or a sagacious zealot desire in which to set on foot an appalling crusade?