To give currency to such ideas, even in Maryland, would be fatal to what ministers call their “influence,” and which they everywhere value at a rather dangerous estimate; accordingly, in the editorial columns prominence is given to the following salve to the outraged sensibilities of the subscribers:
“SLAVE AUCTION IN JAVA.
“A brief article, with this head, appears on the fourth page of our paper this week. It is of a class of articles we never select, because they are very often manufactured by paragraphists for a purpose, and are not reliable. It was put in by our printer in place of something we had marked out. We did not see this objectionable substitute until the outside form was worked off, and are therefore not responsible for it.”[32]
The habitual caution imposed on clergymen and public teachers must, and obviously does have an important secondary effect, similar to that usually attributed by Protestants to papacy, upon the minds of all the people, discountenancing and retarding the free and fearless exercise of the mind upon subjects of a religious or ethical nature, and the necessity of accepting and apologizing for the exceedingly low morality of the nominally religious slaves, together with the familiarity with this immorality which all classes acquire, renders the existence of a very elevated standard of morals among the whites almost an impossibility.[33]
In spite of the constant denunciations by the Southern newspapers, of those who continued to patronize Northern educational institutions, I never conversed with a cultivated Southerner on the effects of slavery, that he did not express a wish or intention to have his own children educated where they should be free from demoralizing association with slaves. That this association is almost inevitably corrupting and dangerous, is very generally (I may say, excepting by the extremest fanatics of South Carolina, universally) admitted. Now, although the children of a few wealthy men may, for a limited period, be preserved from this danger, the children of the million cannot be. Indeed it requires a man of some culture, and knowledge of the rest of the world, to appreciate the danger sufficiently to guard at all diligently against it. If habitual intercourse with a hopelessly low and immoral class is at all bad in its effects on young minds, the people of the South are, as a people, educated subject to this bad influence, and must bear the consequences. In other words, if the slaves must not be elevated, it would seem to be a necessity that the citizens should steadily degenerate.
Change and grow more marked in their peculiarities with every generation, they certainly do, very obviously. “The South” has a traditional reputation for qualities and habits in which I think the Southern people, as a whole, are to-day more deficient than any other nation in the world. The Southern gentleman, as we ordinarily conceive him to be, is as rare a phenomenon in the South at the present day as is the old squire of Geoffry Crayon in modern England. But it is unnecessary to argue how great must be the influence, upon people of a higher origin, of habitual association with a race systematically kept at the lowest ebb of intellect and morals. It has been elaborately and convincingly described by Mr. Jefferson, from his personal experience and observation of his neighbours. What he testified to be the effect upon the Virginians, in his day, of owning and associating with slaves, is now to be witnessed to a far greater and more deplorable extent throughout the whole South, but most deplorably in districts where the slave population predominates, and where, consequently, the action of slavery has been most unimpeded.[34]
What proportion of the larger cotton plantations are resided upon by their owners, I am unable to estimate with confidence. Of those having cabin accommodations for fifty slaves each, which came under my observation from the road, while I was travelling through the rich cotton district bordering the Mississippi river, I think more than half were unprovided with a habitation which I could suppose to be the ordinary residence of a man of moderate wealth. I should judge that a large majority of all the slaves in this district, were left by their owners to the nearly unlimited government of hireling overseers the greater part of the time. Some of these plantations are owned by capitalists, who reside permanently and constantly in the North or in Europe. Many are owned by wealthy Virginians and Carolinians, who reside on the “show plantations” of those States—country seats, the exhausted soil of which will scarcely produce sufficient to feed and clothe the resident slaves, whose increase is constantly removed to colonize these richer fields of the West.
A still larger number are merely occasional sojourning places of their owners, who naturally enough prefer to live, as soon as they can afford to do so, where the conveniences and luxuries belonging to a highly civilized state of society are more easily obtained than they can ever be in a country of large plantations. It is rare that a plantation of this class can have a dozen intelligent families residing within a day’s ride of it. Any society that a planter enjoys on his estate must, therefore, consist in a great degree of permanent guests. Hence the name for hospitality of wealthy planters. A large plantation is necessarily a retreat from general society, and is used by its owner, I am inclined to think, in the majority of cases, in winter, as Berkshire villas and farms are in summer by rich people of New York and Boston. I have never been on a plantation numbering fifty field-hands, the owner of which was accustomed to reside steadily through the year upon it. Still I am aware that there are many such, and possibly it is a minority of them who are regularly absent with their families from their plantations during any considerable part of the year.
The summer visitors to our Northern watering places, and the European tourists, from the South, are, I judge, chiefly of the migratory, wealthy class. Such persons, it is evident are much less influenced in their character and habits, by association with slaves, than any other at the South.
The number of the very wealthy is, of course, small, yet as the chief part of the wealth of these consists in slaves, no inconsiderable proportion of all the slaves belong to men who deputize their government in a great measure to overseers. It may be computed, from the census of 1850, that about one half the slaves of Louisiana and one third that of Mississippi, belong to estates of not less than fifty slaves each, and of these, I believe, nine-tenths live on plantations which their owners reside upon, if at all, but transiently.