Page:Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave.djvu/284

282 but the contrast between them and some others that I have seen, was, unhappily for many of the slaves, very great. I shall, hereafter, refer to this gentleman, at whose house I now was, and shall never name him without honor, nor think of him without gratitude.

As I traveled through the country with my team, my chief employment, beyond my duty of a teamster, was to observe the condition of the slaves on the various plantations by which we passed on our journey, and to compare things in Georgia, as I now saw them, with similar things in Carolina, as I had heretofore seen them.

There is as much sameness among the various cotton plantations in Georgia, as there is among the various farms in New York or New Jersey. He who has seen one cotton-field has seen all the other cotton-fields, bating the difference that naturally results from good and bad soils, or good and bad culture; but the contrast that prevails in the treatment of the slaves, on different plantations, is very remarkable. We traveled a road that was not well provided with public houses, and we frequently stopped for the night at the private dwellings of the planters, and I observed that my master was received as a visitor, and treated as a friend in the family, whilst I was always left at the road with my wagon, my master supplying me with money to buy food for myself and my mules.