One beautiful Sabbath morning I stood on the levee at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and counted twenty-seven sugar-houses in full blast. I found that the negroes were compelled to labour eighteen hours per day, and were not permitted to rest on the Sabbath during the rolling season. The negroes on most plantations have a truck-patch, which they cultivate on the Sabbath. I have pointed out the sin of thus labouring on the Sabbath, but they plead necessity; their children, they state, must suffer from hunger if they did not cultivate their truck-patch, and their masters would not give them time on any other day.
Negroes, by law, are prohibited from learning to read. This law was not strictly enforced in Tennessee and some other States till within a few years past. I had charge of a Sabbath-school for the instruction of blacks in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1853. This school was put down by the strong arm of the law in a short time after my connection with it ceased. In Mississippi, a man who taught slaves to read or write would be sent to the penitentiary instanter. The popular plea for this wickedness is, that if they were taught to read, they would read abolition documents; and if they were taught to write, they would write themselves passes, and pass northward to Canada.
Such advertisements as the following often greet the eye.
“Kansas War.—The undersind taks this method of makkin it noan that he has got a pack of the best nigger hounds in the South. My hounds is well trand, and I has had much experience a huntin niggers, having follered it for the last fiften year. I will go anywhar that I’m sent for, and will ketch niggers at the follerin raits.
“My raits fur ketchin runaway niggers $10 per hed, ef they’s found in the beat whar thar master lives; $15 if they’s found in the county, and $50 if they’s tuck out on the county.
“N. B.—Pay is due when the nigger is tuck. Planters ort to send fur me as soon as thar niggers runs away, while thar trak is fresh.”
Every night the woods resound with the deep-mouthed baying of the bloodhounds. The slaves are said by some to love their masters; but it requires the terrors of bloodhounds and the fugitive slave law to keep them in bondage. You in the North are compelled to act the part of the bloodhounds here, and catch the fugitives for the planters of the South. Free negroes are sold into bondage for the most trivial offences. Slaveholders declare that the presence of free persons of colour exerts a pernicious influence upon their slaves, rendering them discontented with their condition, and inspiring a desire for freedom. They therefore are very desirous of getting rid of these persons, either by banishing them from the State or enslaving them. The legislature of Mississippi has passed a law for their expulsion, and other States have followed in the wake. The Governor of Missouri has vetoed the law for the expulsion of free persons of colour, passed by the legislature of that State because of its unconstitutionality.
Were I to recount all the abominations of the peculiar institution, and the wrongs inflicted upon the African race, that have come under my observation, they would fill a large volume. Slavery is guilty of six abominations; yea, seven may justly be charged upon it. It is said that the negro is lazy, and will not work except by compulsion. I have known negroes who have purchased their freedom by the payment of a large sum, and afterward made not only a good living, but a fortune beside. It is said Judge W—— of South Carolina gave his servants the use of his plantation, upon condition that they would support his family; and that in three years he was compelled to take the management himself, as they did not make a comfortable living for themselves and the Judge’s family. In reply, it might be said that the negroes had not a fair trial, as no one had any property he could call his own, and they were thrown into a sort of Fourierite society, having all things in common. In this state of things, while some would work, others would be idle. White men do not succeed in such communities, and for this reason it was no fair test of the industrial energies of Judge W——’s slaves.
The question is often asked, is slavery sinful in itself? My observation has been extensive, embracing eight slave States, and I have never yet seen any example of slavery that I did not deem sinful. If slavery is not sinful in itself, I must have always seen it out of itself. I have observed its workings during eleven years, amongst a professedly Christian people, and cannot do otherwise than pronounce it an unmitigated curse. It is a curse to the white man, it is a curse to the black man. That God will curse it, and blot it out of existence ere long, is my firm conviction. The elements of its abolition exist; God speed the time when they will be fully developed, and this mother of abominations driven from the land of the free! The development of the eternal principles of justice and rectitude will abolish this hoary monster of fraud and oppression. Slavery subverts all the rights of man. It divests him of citizenship, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness, of his children, of his wife, of his property, of intellectual culture, reserving to him only the rights of the horse and ass, and reducing him to the same chattel condition with them. Not a single right does the State law grant him above that of the mule—no, not one. The chastity of the slave has no legal protection. The Methodist Church South is expunging from the discipline everything inimical to the peculiar institution, whilst I observe that the Church North is adding to her testimony and deliverances against the sin of slaveholding. The Church South refused to abide by the rules of the Church, and hence the guilt of the schism lies with her, and you are henceforth free from any guilt in conniving at the sin which the founder of your church, the illustrious Wesley, regarded as the “sum of all villany.”
Remember me kindly to Mrs. Jackman and family. Hoping to hear from you soon, I beg leave to subscribe myself,