Crissy, misled by an abolitionist, crosses the Ohio and finds freedom too much for her—“the only slavery she had ever known.” An incipient revolt is nipped by Moreland, who, appalled by “the intolerable burden of the slaves’ treachery and ingratitude” says:
I would rather, ten thousand times, cultivate these broad fields myself, than be served by faithless hand and false, hollow hearts. I have hands that can work. I would do it cheerfully; if labor was the portion God had assigned to me in the world. Better, far better, the toiling limbs than the aching heart! He paused a moment in indescribable emotion.
The slaves, naturally, break down and weep. All are forgiven, except Vulcan, who had lifted his “rebel arm” against Moreland: “You must never more wield the hammer or strike the anvil for me.... Go—you are free!” Poor Vulcan....
Mrs. M. J. McIntosh in The Lofty and The Lowly, or Good in All and None All-good (1854), hopes for the solution of the most difficult problem: “how the slave may be elevated to the condition of an intelligent, accountable being, without detriment to the master’s interest.” Mrs. McIntosh is sure that the solution cannot come from the fanatical North; she hopes that the South “with its greater sympathy, love and understanding will awaken to its responsibilities.” Daddy Cato, who has grown gray in faithful service at Montrose Hall, Savannah, is set free and given a little homeplace. He is not proud of his freedom; he will be proud only when he can read the Bible and is free of sin. Following his beloved family to the North, he is highly insulted when he is approached by Boston abolitionists.
Make me free! how can I free any more? Dem da nonsense people, and what dem want take me from Miss Alice for?... I wonder if I been sick and couldn’t do any ting, ef dem would nuss me and take care o’ me liken Miss Alice.... I tink dem crazy ’bout free. Free bery good ting, but free ent all; when you sick, free won’t make you well, free won’t gib you clo’s, no hom’ny, let ’lone meat.
Needless to say, the other slaves at Montrose, away from these crazy people talking about “free,” live their childish lives in happiness. The Lofty and The Lowly is full of piety toward southern divinity.
The Defense Sums Up Its Case. Mrs. Henry R. Schoolcraft’s The Black Gauntlet (1860) is likewise a compendium of proslavery arguments. The comfortable, well-ventilated slave homes “with sitting and sleeping room” and a loft for storing provisions are compared with the dens, holes, cellars and tenements of poor whites in northern cities. Food is good and abundant, with game and fish caught in the slave’s plentiful off time. Slaves were given an acre of ground for their own use and allowed to raise hogs and poultry, of which the produce was sold at full market price. That slaves were ever knocked senseless is “purest fiction,” since “their skulls are so thick that it is doubtful whether any white man’s strength could consummate such a feat.”
I am so satisfied that slavery is the school God has established for the conversion of barbarous nations, that were I an absolute Queen of these United States, my first missionary enterprise would be to send to Africa, to bring the heathen as slaves to this Christian land, and keep them in bondage until compulsory labor had tamed their beastliness....
Mrs. Schoolcraft was a bit late, however; for over two centuries countless ships had been sent, and millions of Africans had been brought “to school” in Christian lands.
Since “not a living man can swear that he has ever heard antislavery sentiment from a slave in the South,” the suffering of the Negro, to Mrs. Schoolcraft, is a lie whipped up by northern politicians. Runaway slaves are always the good-for-nothing rowdies, who flee to escape work and discipline. The separation of slave husbands and wives is no tragedy, since all are polygamists as in Africa.