XLIII.
Slaves—Classes—Anecdotes—Negro instruction—Police—Natchez fencibles—Habitual awe of the negro for the white man—Illustrations—Religious slaves—Negro preaching—General view of slavery and emancipation—Conclusion.
There are properly three distinct classes of slaves in the south. The first, and most intelligent class, is composed of the domestic slaves, or "servants," as they are properly termed, of the planters. Some of these both read and write, and possess a great degree of intelligence: and as the negro, of all the varieties of the human species, is the most imitative, they soon learn the language, and readily adopt the manners, of the family to which they are attached. It is true, they frequently burlesque the latter, and select the high-sounding words of the former for practice—for the negro has an ear for euphony—which they usually misapply, or mis-pronounce.
"Ben, how did you like the sermon to-day?" I once inquired of one, who, for pompous language and high-sounding epithets, was the Johnson of negroes.—"Mighty obligated wid it, master, de 'clusive 'flections werry distructive to de ignorum."
In the more fashionable families, negroes feel it their duty—to show their aristocratic breeding—to ape manners, and to use language, to which the common herd cannot aspire. An aristocratic negro, full of his master's wealth and importance, which he feels to be reflected upon himself, is the most aristocratic personage in existence. He supports his own dignity, and that of his own master, or "family," as he phrases it, which he deems inseparable, by a course of conduct befitting coloured gentlemen. Always about the persons of their masters or mistresses, the domestic slaves obtain a better knowledge of the modes of civilized life than they could do in the field, where negroes can rise but little above their original African state. So identified are they with the families in which they have been "raised," and so accurate, but rough, are the copies which they individually present, of their masters, that were all the domestic slaves of several planters' families transferred to Liberia, or Hayti, they would there constitute a by no means inferior state of African society, whose model would be found in Mississippi. Each family would be a faithful copy of that with which it was once connected: and should their former owners visit them in their new home, they would smile at its resemblance to the original. It is from this class that the friends of wisely-regulated emancipation are to seek material for carrying their plans into effect.
The second class is composed of town slaves; which not only includes domestic slaves, in the families of the citizens, but also all negro mechanics, draymen, hostlers, labourers, hucksters, and washwomen, and the heterogeneous multitude of every other occupation, who fill the streets of a busy city—for slaves are trained to every kind of manual labour. The blacksmith, cabinet-maker, carpenter, builder, wheelwright,—all have one or more slaves labouring at their trades. The negro is a third arm to every working man, who can possibly save money enough to purchase one. He is emphatically the "right-hand man" of every man. Even free negroes cannot do without them: some of them own several, to whom they are the severest masters.
"To whom do you belong?" I once inquired of a negro whom I had employed. "There's my master," he replied; pointing to a steady old negro, who had purchased himself, then his wife, and subsequently his three children, by his own manual exertions and persevering industry. He was now the owner of a comfortable house, a piece of land, and two or three slaves, to whom he could add one every three years. It is worthy of remark, and serves to illustrate one of the many singularities characteristic of the race, that the free negro, who "buys his wife's freedom," as they term it, from her master, by paying him her full value, ever afterward considers her in the light of property.
"Thomas, you are a free man," I remarked to one who had purchased himself and wife from his master, by the profits of a poultry yard and vegetable garden, industriously attended to for many years, in his leisure hours and on Sundays. "You are a free man; I suppose you will soon have negroes of your own."
"Hi! Hab one now, master." "Who, Tom?"—"Ol' Sarah, master." "Old Sarah! she is your wife." "She my nigger too; I pay master five hun'red dollar for her."