Page:Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave.djvu/271

Rh, of both husband and wife, by the murder of the former.

In all parts of the cotton country there are numerous taverns, which answer the double purpose of drinking and gambling houses. These places are kept by men who are willing to abandon all pretensions to the character and standing of gentlemen, for the hope of sordid gain, and are frequented by all classes of planters, though it is not to be understood that all the planters resort to these houses. There are men of high and honorable virtue among the planters, who equally detest the mean cupidity of the men who keep these houses, and the silly wickedness of those who support them. Billiards is the game regarded as the most polite amongst men of education and fashion; but cards, dice and every kind of game, whether of skill or of hazard, are openly played in these sinks of iniquity. So far as my knowledge extends, there is not a single district of ten miles square, in all the cotton region, without at least one of these vile ordinaries, as they are frequently and justly termed. The keeping of these houses is a means of subsistence resorted to by men of desperate reputation, or reckless character, and they invite as guests all the profligate, the drunken, the idle, and the unwary of the surrounding country. In a community where the white man never works, except at the expense of forfeiting all