Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/133

 — for I did not like to be seen reading any thing but the Bible — that taste for knowledge which I had imbibed when a child, and which all the degradations of servitude, had not utterly extinguished. All things considered, I found myself much more agreeably situated, than I had been at any time since the death of my first master.

I wish, both for their sakes and his own, that all the rest of Mr Carleton's slaves had been as well off and as kindly treated as myself. The house servants, it is true, had nothing to complain of; except indeed, those grievous evils, which are inseparable from a state of servitude, and which no tenderness or indulgence on the part of the master, can ever do away. But the plantation hands — some fifty in number — were very differently situated. Mr Carleton, like a large proportion of American planters, had no knowledge of agriculture, and not the slightest taste for it. He had never given any attention to the business of his plantation; his youth had been spent in a course of boisterous dissipation; and since his conversion, he had been entirely devoted to the cause of religion. Of course his planting affairs and all that related to them, were wholly in the hands of his overseer, who was shrewd, plausible, intelligent and well acquainted with his business; but a severe task-master, bad tempered, and if all reports were true, not very much overburdened with honesty. Mr Warner, for this was the overseer's name, was engaged on terms which however ruinous to the planter and his plantation, were very common in Virginia and the Carolinas. Instead of receiving a regular salary in money, he took a certain proportion of the crop.. Of course, it was his interest to make the largest crop possible, without any regard whatever to the means used to make it. What was it to him though the lands were exhausted, and the slaves worn out with heavy tasks and unreasonable labors? He owned neither the lands nor the slaves, and if in ten or twelve years, — and for something like that time he had been established at CarletonHall, — he could scourge all their value out of them, the gain was his, and the loss would be his employer's. This desirable consummation, he seemed pretty nearly arrived at. The lands at Carleton-Hall, were never cultivated, it