Indeed, a Virginian had an opportunity of seeing much choice society at home; for our watering places attracted the best people from other States, who often visited us at our houses.
On the Mississippi boat to which I have alluded, it was remarked that the negro servants paid the Southerners more constant and deferential attention than the passengers from the non-slaveholding States—although some of the latter were very agreeable and intelligent, and conversed with the negroes on terms of easy familiarity—showing, what I had often observed, that the negro respects and admires those who make a “social distinction” more than those who make none.
[CHAPTER X.]
We were surprised to find in an “Ode to the South,” by Mr. M. F. Tupper, published recently, the following stanza:
“Yes it is slander to say you oppress’d them
Does a man squander the prize of his pelf.
Was it not often that he who possessed them
Rather was owned by his servants himself?”
This was true, but that it was known in the outside world we thought impossible, when all the newspaper and book accounts represented us as “miserable sinners” for whom there was no hope here or hereafter, and called upon all nations, Christian and civilized, to “revile, persecute and exterminate us.” Such representations, however, differed so widely from the facts around us, that when we heard them they failed to produce a very serious impression, occasioning often only a smile, with the exclamation: “How little those people know about us!”
We had not the vanity to think that the European nations cared or thought about us, and if the Americans believed these accounts, they defamed the memory of one held up by them as a model of Christian virtue,—George Washington—a Virginia slave-owner, whose kindness to his “people,” as he called his slaves, entitled him to as much honor as did his deeds of prowess.
But to return to the two last lines of the stanza:
“Was it not often that he who possessed them
Rather was owned by his servants himself?”