“And make the night joint laborer with the day;”
though, to lighten the burden as much as possible, the gang is divided into two watches, one taking the first and the other the last part of the night; and, notwithstanding this continued labor, the negroes improve in appearance, and appear fat and flourishing. They drink freely of cane-juice, and the sickly among them revive, and become robust and healthy.
After the grinding is finished, the negroes have several holidays, when they are quite at liberty to dance and frolic as much as they please; and the cane-song—which is improvised by one of the gang, the rest all joining in a prolonged and unintelligible chorus—now breaks, night and day, upon the ear, in notes “most musical, most melancholy.”
The above is inserted as a specimen of the facility with which the most horrible facts may be told in the genteelest phrase. In a work entitled “Travels in Louisiana in 1802” is the following extract (see Weld’s “Slavery as It Is,” p. 134), from which it appears that this cheerful process of laboring night and day lasts three months!
“At the rolling of sugars, an interval of from two to three months, they (the slaves in Louisiana) work both night and day. Abridged of their sleep, they scarcely retire to rest during the whole period.”
Now, let any one learn the private history of seven hundred blacks,—men and women,—compelled to work day and night, under the lash of a driver, for a period of three months.
Possibly, if the gentleman who wrote this account were employed, with his wife and family, in this “cheerful scene” of labor,—if he saw the woman that he loved, the daughter who was dear to him as his own soul, forced on in the general gang, in this toil which
“Does not divide the Sabbath from the week,
And makes the night joint laborer with the day,”
—possibly, if he saw all this, he might have another opinion of its cheerfulness; and it might be an eminently salutary thing if every apologist for slavery were to enjoy some such privilege for a season, particularly as Mr. Ingraham is careful to tell us that its effect upon the general health is so excellent that the negroes improve in appearance, and appear fat and flourishing, and that the sickly among them revive, and become robust and healthy. One would think it a surprising fact, if working slaves night and day, and giving them cane-juice to drink, really produces such salutary results, that the practice should not be continued the whole year round; though, perhaps, in this case, the negroes would become so fat as to be unable to labor. Possibly, it is because this healthful process is not longer continued that the agricultural societies of Louisiana are obliged to set down an annual loss of slaves on sugar plantations to the amount of two and a half per cent. This ought to be looked into by philanthropists. Perhaps working them all night for six months, instead of three, might remedy the evil.