Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/18

16 the miserable starving foreigners, who arrive by thousands every day among them; but, Satan appearing to them as an angel of light, sends them to the peaceful cottage of the far-off slave, to stimulate him to fiendish and bloody deeds. There are in the South some bad men. They are bad as sons, as husbands, as fathers, as neighbors; and yet these very men have motives to be kind as masters, that nothing but idiocy or lunacy can ever blind them to. I myself believe there are hundreds of men in the world, who are incapable of a more intelligent or elevated affection than that they extend to a favorite horse or dog; and many a heart-broken wife would feel herself fortunate, if she could share with the said favorite horse or dog her husband's solicitude for their comfort and well-being.

My brother, the slave has, you know, a great protection too in public opinion, that, among the chivalrous gentlemen of South Carolina, brands with infamy a cruel master, or one who neglects those fellow-beings who are by God placed under his care, and entirely dependent on him. In all my intercourse with the world, I have never seen more beautiful sensibilities developed than I have seen around the dying couch of an old family slave, where no eye but that of God criticized the acts and feelings of the master. You remember our good old Amey, who lived to the age of one hundred and ten years. You used yourself to carry her her coffee and other dainties for breakfast, and she never tired of telling us about our father's childhood and our grandfather's kindness to his slaves. When she was dying, she insisted that I should sit close to her, and receive her last words.

I am very sure that the disinterested devotion I have seen masters extend to the wants of their decrepit and utterly helpless old slaves, will be remembered by Jesus Christ at the last day, and that those masters who have thus performed their Christian duty will receive the plaudit, "Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." But, soothing as these retrospections of our father's useful life and humane management of his numerous slaves are to my heart, I must turn from the pleasing picture, and tell you what the abolitionists have reported about us at the North. They say, "That one of our punishments is to bury our negroes up to their necks, and leave them for a whole day perhaps thus imprisoned." "That a master claims all the property of the slave when he dies, and his wife and children get nothing; and that he takes it even when his said slave is living, if he feels so disposed." "That, when we sell our negroes, we separate little children from their mothers." "That we lock up our negroes every night on the plantations, and the master never