But you will tire of this. I will resume my story. I will only say that I told the lady that some of my gentleman friends would call her a strong-minded woman.
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Your letter made me think of something which happened to a lady, a fellow-traveller of ours, a few weeks, ago. She came here to visit a lady whose husband owns one hundred and fifty slaves. The morning after she reached the plantation, as she told me, she was awaked by the cracking of whips. She listened; human voices, raised above the ordinary pitch, were mingling with the sounds. She lay till she could endure it no longer. Coming down to the piazza, she saw a white man mending a harness on a horse. "Those whips," said she, inquiringly,—"they have rather interfered with my peace. Any of the colored people been doing wrong?" He hesitated, and kept on fixing his harness, till, finally, he turned round,—for he had been standing with his back to her and, as she supposed, to hide his chagrin at being questioned on so trying a subject. "Truth is, Madam," said he, taking a large piece of tobacco and a knife from his pocket, and helping himself slowly,—"truth is, we have so much of this work to do, we have to begin early. Sorry it disturbed you;" and he gathered up the reins and drove off.
The whips kept up their racket. "Here," said she to herself, "is the house of Bondage. How can I spend a month here?" She thought that she would peep round the house. Yet she feared that she should be considered as intruding into things which she had better not meddle with. But the screams became so fearful that she could no longer restrain herself. She rushed round the corner of the house, and came full against a black woman rinsing some fustian clothes in a tub near the rain-spout. "Do dear tell me," said she, "what they are doing to those people. Who is whipping them? What have they done?" The black woman stopped, and looked round without taking her hands from her tub, and then said, as she went on rinsing, "Lorfull help you, Missis, dem's de young uns scaring de birds out of de grain."
What bliss there was to her in that moment of relief! Six or eight little negroes were sauntering about at their morning work, each having a rude whip, with tape for a snapper, interrupting the hungry birds at their breakfast.
I expected to see a wretched, down-trodden, alms-house looking set of creatures; for the word slave, and all the changes which are rung on that word, made me think only of people who are convicts, such as you see in the state-prison yard at Charlestown, Mass. I never expected that they would look me in the face, but would skulk by me as a spy or enemy. A Christian heart is overjoyed to find what religion and society have done for these colored people. If one who had never heard of "slavery" should be set down here, the Northern idea of "bondage" would not soon occur to him.
In the Presbytery which includes Charleston, S.C., there are two thousand eight hundred and eighty-nine church-members, and of these one thousand six hundred-and thirty-seven, more than one half, are colored. In State Street, Mobile, there is a colored Methodist Church who pay their minister, from their own money, twelve hundred dollars a year. Not long since they took up a voluntary contribution for Home Missions, amounting to one hundred and twenty dollars. Their preacher was sent by the Conference, according to rotation, into another field, and the blacks presented him with a valuable suit of clothes.
You see things here, good and evil, side by side, and mixed up together, one thing counterbalancing another. If you reason theoretically upon this subject, as you do "about the moon," to quote from your letter, it is enough to make one almost a lunatic, and I do not wonder that some of our good people at the North, who pore over this subject in this way, are on the borders of insanity.
My great mistake at the North with regard to this subject of slavery was, I reasoned about it in the abstract, instead of considering it in connection with those who are slaves under our laws, bound up with us in our civil constitution. Things might be true or false, right or wrong, in connection with the enslavement of a race who had never been slaves, which cannot be applied to the colored people of the South. Hence, the arguments and the appeals founded on the wrongfulness of reducing you or me to slavery are obviously misapplied when used to urge the emancipation of these slaves. Moreover, my thoughts about slavery were governed by my associations with the word slave, in its worst sense. This is wholly wrong, and it is the source of most of our mistakes on this subject.
Dreadful things happen here to some of the slaves in the hands of passionate men. One slave who had run away was caught, and was beaten for a long time, and melted turpentine was then poured upon his wounds. He lingered for several hours. But the horror and execration which this deed met with were no greater at the North than at the South. It cannot be denied that slavery, as well as marriage, affords peculiar provocations and facilities for cruel deeds,—according to the doctrine of your friend and fellow-Sophomore. But in which section there is the more of unpunished wickedness, I am slow to pronounce, for I do not wish to condemn my own people, nor to justify others in their sins. An excellent minister in Cincinnati not long since preached a sermon on murder, in which he stated that "during his residence in that city, there had been more than one hundred murders, or an average of two a month, while in no instance had the perpetrator been executed." Reading lately of a husband at the North throwing oil of vitriol from a bottle, filled for the purpose, over his wife's face and neck, and of a Northern clergyman feeding his young wife, as she sat on his knee, with apple on which he had sprinkled arsenic, I questioned whether human nature were not about the same everywhere. The theoretical right of a master, in certain cases, to put his slave to death, without judge or jury, is controlled by the self-interest of the owner who, of course, does not recklessly destroy his own property. The slave-codes are no just exponent of the actual state of things in slavery. For example,—by law a master may not furnish his slave with less than a peck of corn a week. This has a barbarous look. But to see the slaves feasting on the fat of the land you certainly would not be reminded of the "peck of corn," except by contrast. There must be some legal standard, below which if an inhuman master falls in providing for his servant, he can be prosecuted. Hence the "peck of corn." By the will of an eminent citizen at the North, establishing courses of lectures for all coming time, the pay of each lecturer is to be determined by the market value, at the time, of a bushel of wheat. This is a fair standard for the unit of measure.