[Footnote 43: Letter of Caroline Raoul, Belleville, S.C., Dec. 26, 1829, to
James H. Hammond. MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]
Likewise where the family affairs of slaves were concerned the silence and passiveness of the law gave masters occasion for eloquence and activity. Thus a Georgian wrote to a neighbor: "I have a girl Amanda that has your servant Phil for a husband. I should be very glad indeed if you would purchase her. She is a very good seamstress, an excellent cook—makes cake and preserves beautifully—and washes and irons very nicely, and cannot be excelled in cleaning up a house. Her disposition is very amiable. I have had her for years and I assure you that I have not exaggerated as regards her worth…. I will send her down to see you at any time."[44] That offers of purchase were no less likely than those of sale to be prompted by such considerations is suggested by another Georgia letter: "I have made every attempt to get the boy Frank, the son of James Nixon; and in order to gratify James have offered as far as five hundred dollars for him—more than I would pay for any negro child in Georgia were it not James' son."[45] It was therefore not wholly in idyllic strain that a South Carolinian after long magisterial service remarked: "Experience and observation fully satisfy me that the first law of slavery is that of kindness from the master to the slave. With that … slavery becomes a family relation, next in its attachments to that of parent and child."[46]
[Footnote 44: Letter of E.N. Thompson, Vineville, Ga. (a suburb of Macon), to J.B. Lamar at Macon, Ga., Aug. 7, 1854. MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]
[Footnote 45: Letter of Henry Jackson, Jan. 11, 1837, to Howell Cobb. MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]
[Footnote 46: J.B. O'Neall in J.B.D. DeBow ed., Industrial Resources of the South and West, II (New Orleans, 1852), 278.]
On the whole, the several sorts of documents emanating from the Old South have a character of true depiction inversely proportioned to their abundance and accessibility. The statutes, copious and easily available, describe a hypothetical régime, not an actual one. The court records are on the one hand plentiful only for the higher tribunals, whither questions of human adjustments rarely penetrated, and on the other hand the decisions were themselves largely controlled by the statutes, perverse for ordinary practical purposes as these often were. It is therefore to the letters, journals and miscellaneous records of private persons dwelling in the régime and by their practices molding it more powerfully than legislatures and courts combined, that the main recourse for intimate knowledge must be had. Regrettably fugitive and fragmentary as these are, enough it may be hoped have been found and used herein to show the true nature of the living order.
The government of slaves was for the ninety and nine by men, and only for the hundredth by laws. There were injustice, oppression, brutality and heartburning in the régime,—but where in the struggling world are these absent? There were also gentleness, kind-hearted friendship and mutual loyalty to a degree hard for him to believe who regards the system with a theorist's eye and a partisan squint. For him on the other hand who has known the considerate and cordial, courteous and charming men and women, white and black, which that picturesque life in its best phases produced, it is impossible to agree that its basis and its operation were wholly evil, the law and the prophets to the contrary notwithstanding.
INDEX
Acklen, Joseph A.S.,
plantation home of
rules of, for overseers
Africa, West, see Guinea
Agriculture, see cotton, indigo, rice, sugar and tobacco
culture
Aiken, William, rice plantation of
Aime, Valcour, sugar plantation of
Amissa, enslaved and restored to Africa
Angolas,
tribal traits of
revolt of
Antipathy, racial,
Jefferson's views on
in Massachusetts
in North and South compared
Northern spokesmen of
Arabs, in the Guinea trade
Asiento
Azurara, Gomez E.
Baltimore, negro churches in
Barbados,
emigration from,
to Carolina
to Jamaica
founding of
planters' committee of
slave laws of,
sugar culture in
Belmead plantation
Benin
Black codes,
administration of
attitude of citizens toward
local ordinances
origin of,
in Barbados
in the Northern colonies
in Louisiana
in South Carolina
in Virginia
tenor of,
in the North
in the South
Bobolinks, in rice fields
Bonny
Boré, Etienne de, sugar planter
Bosman, William, in the Guinea trade
Branding of slaves
Bristol, citizens of, in the slave trade
Burial societies, negro
Burnside, John, merchant and sugar planter
Butler, Pierce,
the younger,
slaves of, sold