The statute-book demonstrates that the law was steadily bettering the condition of the slave. I have not space to state the progression which can be found in the different Georgia enactments. But I must mention two instances. In 1850 the procedure of trying a white person charged with a capital offence was extended to the slave. The code which came of force January 1, 1863, and which had been adopted some while before, prevented any confession made by a slave to his master—it mattered not how voluntary or free from suspicion it might be—from ever being received in evidence against him.
I commenced law practice in 1857. From that time until I went to the front I observed that public opinion was becoming more decided against mistreatment of the blacks. The masters of ashcats,—as ill-fed negroes were called in derision of their lean and dingy faces by the great multitude of sleek and shining ones,—those who punished with unreasonable severity, those who exacted overwork,—they were few and far between,—they were all more and more detested; and grand juries became more and more prone to deal properly with them. I would support this by cases, if their citation would not be unpleasant to descendants of parties.
Mrs. Stowe has his master to brand George Harris in the hand with the initial letter of the former’s surname. She has Legree’s slaves to pick cotton on Sunday. I never heard of any cases of branding human beings except as a punishment for crime in execution of a judgment of conviction, and very few of them. Tidying up the house, cooking, serving meals, caring for the animals on the place, and such other things as are done everywhere on Sunday, were of course required of the domestic slaves. Leaving these out, no slave was ever put to work on Sunday except to “fight fire,” or at something commanded by a real emergency. Their employers now exact from thousands of white persons of both sexes all over the country a great amount of such hard and grinding Sunday work as was never exacted of the slaves in the south. Peep into stores, offices of large corporations, and elsewhere, while others are at Sunday-school or church, and count those weary ones you find finishing up the work of the last week.
But all of the mistakes of Mrs. Stowe noticed in the foregoing are mere matters of bagatelle as compared with the character and nature which she gives the average negro of the south.
She represents the women as chaste as white women, and the husbands faithful to their wives even when separated from them. I shall now tell the truth as I know it to be—the truth that all observant people who have had experience with negroes know.
The moment almost that a married pair of slaves were separated for any cause, each one secretly, or more often openly, took another partner. Even when not separated, infidelity of both was the rule. Mrs. Stowe has the girls and their parents to shrink with horror from the desires of the master. To the simple-hearted African the master was always great, and there was among them not a woman to be found who would not dedicate herself or her daughter to greatness, finding it so inclined,—husband, father, brothers, and sisters all in their desire for a friend at court heartily approving. The white whose concubine gave favors behind his back to her slave friends was the stalest joke of every neighborhood.
The mass of the negroes are more unchaste now than they were in slavery, a subject of which I shall say something further in another chapter. But even where the master’s steady requirement from one generation to another of a stricter observance of family ties, and the natural imitation of the ways of the dominant race, had lifted the slaves, in appearance at least, far above their West African ancestors, not even mothers had become chaste. Boys, girls, men, and women, both married and unmarried, were as promiscuous by night as houseflies are by day. The horror of horrors in this abyss of moral impurity to one of a superior race was their utter unconsciousness of incest.[93]
Mrs. Stowe has their philoprogenitiveness—as phrenologists call it—as fully developed as the whites. One bred in the cotton districts well remembers that it required all the vigilance of master and mistress, overseer, and the deputies selected from the older slave women, to secure from the mothers proper attention to their children, and especially to keep them from punishing too cruelly. But I do not mean to say that this parental misbehavior was as general as the unchastity mentioned. When the mothers aged beyond forty-five or fifty, they would begin to think somewhat less of beaux and somewhat more of their children.
George Harris and Eliza are next of the slave characters in prominence and importance to Uncle Tom. With their large admixture of white blood, their comparatively good education and superb moral training, a southerner would think that you were merely mocking him if you named these as fairly representative negroes. As they are drawn, they are really whites—whites of high refinement—with only a physical negro exterior, and that softened down to the minimum.
But Uncle Tom—I pray my northern readers to take counsel of their common sense and consider what I shall now say of him. Rightly to estimate him, I must begin with some contrasts. The first that occurs to me is Tyndarus, the slave hero of the Captivi of Plautus, pronounced by the great critic Lessing to be the most beautiful play ever brought upon the stage. Tyndarus and Philocrates, his young master, taken prisoners, are sold to Hegio. The two captives personate each other, and induce Hegio to send home Philocrates, who was a wealthy noble, and keep only the born slave. Hegio was scheming to recover his own son, now a slave in the land of the captives, by a bargain for Philocrates, this bargain to be negotiated by the counterfeit Tyndarus. Discovering how he had been duped, the anguished father tells the real Tyndarus that he shall die a cruel death. This is the reply of the slave: