Page:A Chapter on Slavery.djvu/170

 may be presented. We will adduce the following case. The late President Madison, in a letter to a gentleman, published just before his decease, writes as follows: — 'You express a wish to obtain information in relation to the history of the emancipated people of color in Prince Edward [County Virginia]: I presume you refer, more especially, to those emancipated by the late Richard Randolph. More than twenty-five years ago, I think, they were liberated; at which time they numbered about one hundred, and were settled on small parcels of land of from ten to twenty-five acres to each family. As long as the habits of industry, which they had acquired while slaves, lasted, they continued to increase in numbers, and lived in some degree of comfort. But as soon as this was lost, and most of those who had been many years in slavery either died or became old and infirm, and a new race, raised in idleness and vice, sprung up, they began not only to be idle and vicious, but to diminish instead of increasing, and have continued to diminish in numbers very regularly every year, and that, too, without emigration; for they have, almost without exception, remained together, in the same situation as at first placed, to this day. Idleness, poverty, and dissipation are the agents which continue to diminish their numbers, and to render them wretched in the extreme, as well as a great pest and heavy tax upon the neighborhood in which they live. There is so little of industry, and so much dissipation among them, that it is impossible for the females to rear their children; and the operations of time, profligacy, and disease, more than keep pace with any