Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/58

38 Another problem, more menacing and insistent than that of education, was the problem of slavery. Poe was reared in a slave-holding community; he was one of the first American writers to introduce a slave and his dialect into a short story; and his thought on the great issue itself is characteristically matured and original. In 1836 he writes:

"There is a view of the subject most deeply interesting to us, which we do not think has ever been presented by any writer in as high relief as it deserves. We speak of the moral influences flowing from the relation of master and slave, and the moral feelings engendered and cultivated by it.... We shall take leave to speak, as of things in esse, of a degree of loyal devotion on the part of the slave to which the white man's heart is a stranger, and of the master's reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent, equally incomprehensible to him who drives a bargain with the cook who prepares his food, the servant who waits at his table, and the nurse who dozes over his sick bed. That these sentiments in the breast of the negro and his master are stronger than they would be under like circumstances between individuals of the white race, we believe. That they belong to the class of feelings 'by which the heart is made better,' we know. How come they? They have their rise in the relation between the infant and the nurse. They are cultivated between him and his foster brother. They are cherished by the parents of both. They are fostered by the habit of affording protection and favors to the younger offspring of the same nurse. They grow by the habitual use of the