"'But,' said the young Northern lady, who had recently come to be a teacher in the family where we visited, 'what will become of them when you die?'
"'Why, Miss,' said he, 'what will become of any household when the parents die? The truth is,' said he, 'I believe in a covenant-keeping God. I make a practice of praying for my servants, by name. I keep a list of them, and I read it, sometimes, when I read my Bible, and on the Sabbath, and on days set apart for religious services. I have asked God to be the God of my servants forever. I shall meet them at the bar of God, and I trust with a good conscience. Many of them have become Christians.'
"'Do you ever sell them?' said she.
"'I have parted with some of my servants to families,' he replied, 'where I knew that they would fare as well as with me. This was always with their consent, except in two or three cases of inveterate wickedness, when, instead of sending the fellows to the state-prison for life, as you would do at the North, I sold them to go to Red River, and was as willing to see them marched off, handcuffed, as you ever were to see villains in the custody of the officers. But had any of your good people from the North met them, an article would have appeared, perhaps, in all your papers, telling of the heart-rending spectacle,—three human beings, in a slave-coffle! going, they knew not where, into hopeless bondage! And had they escaped and fled to Boston, the tide of philanthropy there, in many benevolent bosoms, would have received new strength in the grateful accession of these worshipful fugitives from Southern cruelty. Whereas, all which love and kindness, and every form of indulgence, instruction, and discipline, tempered with mercy, could do, had been used with them in vain. One was a thief, the pest of the county, and had earned long years in a penitentiary; but slavery, you see, kept him at liberty! Another was brutally cruel to animals; another was the impersonation of laziness. Two of them would have helped John Brown, no doubt, had he come here, and they might have gained a Bunker Hill name, at the North, in an insurrection here, as champions of liberty.'
"This led to some remarks about the great economy which there is in the Southern mode of administering discipline and correction on the spot, and at once, instead of filling jails and houses of correction with felons. But to dwell on this would lead me too far into a new branch of our subject.
"This planter asked the young lady, the school-teacher, if tare and tret were in her arithmetic? Upon her saying 'yes, in the older books,' he told her that there was, seemingly, a good deal of tare and tret in God's providence, when accomplishing his great purposes; and that to fix the mind inordinately on evils and miseries incident to a great system and forgetting the main design, was like a man of business being so absorbed by the deductions and waste in a great staple as to forego the trade. He said that he thought the Northern mind ciphered too much in that part of moral arithmetic as to slavery.
"A very excellent gentleman from the District of Columbia who had held an important office under government, gave us some valuable information. He said that the extinction of slavery in New England was not because the institution was deemed to be immoral or sinful, but from other considerations and circumstances. It was abolished in Massachusetts, without doubt, by a clause, in the bill of rights, copied from the Declaration of Independence. In Berkshire, one township, he believed, sued another for the support and maintenance of a pauper slave, and the Supreme Court decided that the bill of rights abolished slavery. The question was as incidental, he said, as was the question in the Dred Scott case which the United States Supreme Court decided. This Massachusetts case was previous to any reports of decisions, and he had some doubt as to the form in which the suit was brought, but was sure as to the decision. The question as to abolishing slavery was not submitted to the people, nor to a Convention, nor to the Legislature.
"I was specially interested in his account of the way in which the slave-trade was prohibited by our excellent sister, Connecticut. It was done by a section prohibiting the importation of slaves by sea or land, preceded by the following preamble:—'And whereas the increase of slaves in this state is injurious to the poor, and inconvenient, Be it therefore enacted.' Another section of the same statute, he said, was preceded by the following words:—'And whereas sound policy requires that the abolition of slavery should be effected, as soon as may be consistent with the rights of individuals, and the public safety and welfare, Be it enacted,' etc. Then follows the provision that all black and mulatto children, born in slavery, in that state, after the first of March, 1784, shall be free at twenty-five years of age. Selling slaves, to be carried out of the state, was not prohibited before May, 1792; thus allowing more than eight years to the owners of slaves in Connecticut to sell their slaves to Southern purchasers! 'There seems to me,' he said, 'no evidence of superior humanity in this; nor was it repentance for slavery as a sin.' He thought that if we feel compelled, by our superior conscientiousness, to require any duty of the South, all that decency will allow us to demand is, that she tread in our steps.
"'I think,' said a planter, 'that if pity is due from one to the other, the South owes the larger debt to the North. There needs to be a great reformation, namely, The Gradual Emancipation of the Northern Mind from "Anti-slavery" Error.'
"'Our English friends, in their zeal against American slavery,' said a young lawyer, 'seem to forget that the English government, at the Peace of Utrecht, agreed to furnish Spain with four thousand negroes annually for thirty years.'