Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/126

 him as they please. He cannot help himself; and there is no one to help him.

Mr Carleton, while he entertained most of the notions of his brother planters, differed from the greater part of them in one striking particular. He was a zealous presbyterian, und very warm and earnest, in the cause of religion. Had any one told him, that to hold men in slavery was a highhanded offence against religion and morality, what would have been his answer? Would his heart have responded to the truth of a sentiment so congenial to every more generous emotion and better feeling? I am much afraid it would not. I fear he would have answered much like those of his brother slave-holders, who made no pretensions. whatever to peculiar piety. With a secret consciousness of his criminality, but with a fixed determination never to admit it, he would have worked himself into a violent passion; talked of the ‘sacred rights of property,'- — more sacred in a slave-holder's estimation than either liberty or justice; and declaimed against impertinent interference in the affairs of other people, — a topic, by the way, which is very seldom much insisted upon, except by those whose affairs will hardly bear examination.

Mr Carleton, though a zealous presbyterian, had, as I have said, most of the feelings and notions of his brother planters. It thus happened, that his character, his conversation and his conduct were full of strange contrasts, and were forever presenting an odd, incongruous mixture of the bully and the puritan, I use the word bully for want of a better, not exactly in its most vulgar sense, but intending to signify by it, a certain spirit of bravado and violence, a disposition to settle every disputed point by the pistol, so common, I might almost say universal, in the southern States of America, Mr Carleton with all his piety, talked as familiarly of shooting people, as if he had been a professed assassin.

As I had the honor of waiting upon Mr Carleton's table, and the pleasure and advantage of listening every day to his conversation, I soon came to understand his character perfectly, — as perfectly at least as it was possible for anybody to understand so very inconsistent a character. He had