Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/475



was my intention at the commencement of this work to introduce in an Appendix at its close, such of the scenes which I had witnessed, and of my own experiences in the Slave States of America, and in Cuba, as I considered necessary to be made known; but which I had not related in my letters, being unwilling to point out persons and places. The celebrated work, however, of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” and still more her lately published work “A Key, &c.,” have rendered this unpleasant duty unnecessary for me. For my narratives would not have presented any facts essentially different to those which she has introduced into her story, so that I need not farther prolong this work, which is already too much extended, than by remarking that my proposed narration would have principally strengthened my often-repeated observation regarding the demoralising effect of the institution of slavery on the white population.

When I saw a young man of almost angelic beauty, a noble by descent and appearance, sell his soul with the full consciousness of doing so, to receive the wages of a slave-driver, heard him acknowledge that he did not dare to read the Bible, heard him say that he—at the beginning of his career—would not for any money have touched a negro with the whip, but that now he should be able, without hesitation, to have a negro flogged to death for “example's sake,” to chase them with blood-hounds or do anything else; when I heard one of the richest planters of Louisiana, one of the politest of gentlemen, naïvely praise himself and the system on his plantation, without having the slightest idea of the miserable hypocrisy, and the despotism which the whole of his conduct on these plantations betrayed; when I saw a Christian woman and mother