In taking account of the history of the slave in this Union it is not amiss for me to bear testimony as to the spirit with which the body of our slave owners met the singular obligations of their positions. There were here and there base men who abused their trust as masters—some, indeed, who never perceived its existence. But of the very many slave owners whom I can remember I can recall but three who failed to recognize the burden that fate had put upon them and to deal with it much as they dealt with the other cares of their households—conscientiously and mercifully, though often in the rude whacking way in which parents of old dealt with their children; so far as slavery was a household affair, and even where the farm employed no more hands than could be gathered in a house "quarter," the people were commonly subject to an anxious scrutiny as regarded their moral and religious training. Here and there, especially when there were young white men about, the result was the deplorable mixture of the races. There is no question but that this was extensive, though the amount of it is exaggerated. Yet it was common enough to degrade the whites and to make of itself a sufficient reason for ending the institution, however profitable it might otherwise have been. Men of no race are safely to be trusted with such power. The social evil was the heaviest part of the load which the high-minded slave owners had to bear. It was shared in even larger measure by his wife and daughters. How heavy the cross was can only be known to those who remember the conditions of that unhappy time.
The result of the hopeless effort to keep the slaves in decent ways and to prevent the pollution of their sons was to make nearly every right-minded slaveholder at heart an abolitionist. Although the men, and even the women, who suffered most would have been disposed to slay any one who suggested that they shared the opinions of the detested antislavery folk, nearly every one in his heart reprobated the institution and in his mind was revolving some scheme, generally fanciful, by which an end of it might be made. They were in the unhappy position where overwhelming self-interest fought with their moral sense. Now and then some one of them passed the critical point and entered into the fold of the accursed abolitionists; but others, after the manner of average men, paltered with the situation, waiting for fate to decide the matter. In the meantime, they strove as best they could to lift these people to a higher estate.
In many ways the standard of care by which the conduct of a master in relation to his slaves was judged was high. He was expected to clothe them in a fit manner, keep them from the nocturnal wanderings, termed "running," so common a trait in these children of the tropics, to see that they were decently married, that they went to church in a dutiful way, and, above all, that they were not abused by other whites, particularly by other slaveholders. To strike or even to vilify the slaves of another was a very serious thing. The offended person knew well that it was his part to make his complaint to the servant's master. Where the negroes exceeded in number those needed for household and personal service—there were often a dozen or two thus employed in families of no great wealth—there was a division between the house people and the "hands." Those in the former group were selected folk, often belonging to families that had been associated with those of their masters for a century or more. Such servants had rights that none could dispute. Not uncommonly their elders were the actual rulers of the establishment. These family slaves often received some little schooling, even when the laws forbade that slaves should be taught to read and write. The children of the household servants were allowed freely to play with those of their masters until the young people were about twelve years old. The boys of both often had their rough-and-tumble games together until they were young men. The field laborers, where the class was separate, had less perfect connection with their masters. They usually came to the family storeroom for the daily issued rations, which they received from the hands of the mistress or the daughter of the house. They were visited when sick, and their complaints were heard. They were free to all of the many festivities of the holiday time.
It is impossible to conceive of a more effective schooling for the African people than was given this adoption into the households, and often into the hearts, of high-minded masters. A like opportunity never before came and will never again come to so lowly a folk. The effect of this educative contact with the superior race is, as before noted, to be seen in the temper of the negroes during and after the civil war. Upon the high-minded master the effect of the institution was in many ways enlarging. A man is morally what his cares have made him, and of these the dutiful slaveholder has more than an average share. He grew in the power of command and in the habit of doing justice to many fellow-beings. He lived a large life. The qualities bred of his station have been of profit to his folk and time. All this is true of slavery of the domestic sort. It is not so in like manner of the great plantations which came with the development of the cotton and sugar industries. It was characteristic of the northern part of the South until it began to be the place of supply for the rapidly developing plantation district.
So long as the negro could look forward to life in the place and with the people of his birth his simple, careless nature opened to him little to bring a sense of danger. He was to live on until he passed in to the Elysium of the hereafter, of which he had no doubt whatever. Gradually there came, in the overcrowding of the farms and the diminishing fertility of the wasted land, the need of reducing the number of slaves. Then each year came the dreaded visits of the "trader," who was like a visible angel of death, to lead one or more into the far unknown country. Before the plantation demand for slaves began there were, of course, sales of slaves, but they commonly went as families, and not to places to them inconceivably remote. These could hope for Christmas reunions and other exchanges, but when the negro was "sold South" the place and people that had known him would know him no more. My first impression of the iniquity of slavery came from the anxious questions of negroes as to the danger of their being sold to Alabama, that State being then the supposed destination of all those who were out of favor. They naturally strove to make interest with children whom they thought could successfully intercede for them.
There were several very diverse consequences arising from the exportation of slaves from the border States to the far South. It shook the confidence of the negro as to his safety in all that was dearest to him, and thus did much to degrade the relation between him and his master. It served, cruel as it was, to elevate the relatively uncivilized blacks of the more Southern districts, where the newly imported laborers were mostly accumulated. It curiously operated to elevate the quality of the blacks in what was termed the slave-breeding States, those where the institution had longest been established. This was due to the selection of those of lower grade for the market. As it became necessary to part with slaves, a choice was naturally made of men and women who had least endeared themselves to the household. Save in rare cases, the trader sought rather the lusty youths for their brawn than the more delicate, refined house people. Moreover, where a fellow had shown a tendency to any vice, the choice fell on him. In this way for two or three generations a weeding process went on, with the result that the negroes who were left in the districts where the work was done acquired a quality noticeably better than those on the Southern plantations. The difference is almost that we would look for between two distinct races. The faces of the selected folk are more intelligent, the lines of their bodies finer, their moral and intellectual quality very much above those of their lower kindred. They are at their best, in very numerous instances, as gentle as the elect of our own race.
Where, as in the Southern plantations, the institution of slavery was deliberately made the basis of large commercial interests, the motives were wholly different from whatever existed in the early and better days, when the slaves were appendages of a household. Even on the largest tobacco plantations the numbers were not such as to exclude a share of contact with friendly whites. But on the great properties of the South the negro was not to any extent subject to the influences which had in the earlier stage of his apprenticeship done so much for him. Worked in gangs that were counted by the hundreds, seeing no whites except the overseers, they tended to lose what little culture they had gained. Their peculiar but perfectly intelligible speech began a degradation into a puzzling jargon. African superstitions, little if any trace of which remained among their kindred in Virginia and Kentucky, regained their hold. Marriage and a respect therefor, which had been tolerably well affirmed, tended to disappear. All trace of good thus vanished from the system.
Although the great plantation, of the Mississippi type, was a relatively novel feature in American slaveholding, it was evidently the only largely profitable method of using slave labor. In the household system the care of the children, the aged, and the infirm, the unbusinesslike management of the labor, and the tendency to slipshod methods which with negroes can only be corrected by strict discipline, made ordinary farming unremunerative. It is evident that the profit, other than that in mere money, which the institution in the earlier state had brought to master and slave was rapidly diminishing, and that any further maintenance of it would have been calamitous. Though we may regret that it was ended by the civil war, it is difficult to see any other way in which it could have been terminated, or any profit which could have been gained by postponing the crisis.
