Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/537

Rh and even where the farm employed no more hands than could be gathered in a house "quarter," the people were commonly subject to an anxious scrutiny as regarded their moral and religious training. Here and there, especially when there were young white men about, the result was the deplorable mixture of the races. There is no question but that this was extensive, though the amount of it is exaggerated. Yet it was common enough to degrade the whites and to make of itself a sufficient reason for ending the institution, however profitable it might otherwise have been. Men of no race are safely to be trusted with such power. The social evil was the heaviest part of the load which the high-minded slave owners had to bear. It was shared in even larger measure by his wife and daughters. How heavy the cross was can only be known to those who remember the conditions of that unhappy time.

The result of the hopeless effort to keep the slaves in decent ways and to prevent the pollution of their sons was to make nearly every right-minded slaveholder at heart an abolitionist. Although the men, and even the women, who suffered most would have been disposed to slay any one who suggested that they shared the opinions of the detested antislavery folk, nearly every one in his heart reprobated the institution and in his mind was revolving some scheme, generally fanciful, by which an end of it might be made. They were in the unhappy position where overwhelming self-interest fought with their moral sense. Now and then some one of them passed the critical point and entered into the fold of the accursed abolitionists; but others, after the manner of average men, paltered with the situation, waiting for fate to decide the matter. In the meantime, they strove as best they could to lift these people to a higher estate.

In many ways the standard of care by which the conduct of a master in relation to his slaves was judged was high. He was expected to clothe them in a fit manner, keep them from the nocturnal wanderings, termed "running," so common a trait in these children of the tropics, to see that they were decently married, that they went to church in a dutiful way, and, above all, that they were not abused by other whites, particularly by other slaveholders. To strike or even to vilify the slaves of another was a very serious thing. The offended person knew well that it was his part to make his complaint to the servant's master. Where the negroes exceeded in number those needed for household and personal service—there were often a dozen or two thus employed in families of no great wealth—there was a division between the house people and the "hands." Those in the former group were selected folk, often belonging to families that had been associated with those of