Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/134

 is likely, with any tolerable skill; but Mr Warner had carried the process of exhaustion to its last extremity. Field after field had been 'turned out' as they call it — that is, left uncultivated and unfenced, to grow up with broom-sedge and persimmon bushes, and be grazed by all the cattle of the neighborhood. Year after year, new land had been opened, and exposed to the same exhausting process, which had worn out the fields that had been already abandoned; — till at last, there was no new land left upon the plantation.

Mr Warner now began to talk about throwing up his employment; and it was only by urgent solicitations, and a greater proportion of the diminished produce, that Mr Carleton had prevailed upon him to remain another year.

But it was not the land only, that suffered. The slaves were subjected to a like process of exhaustion; and what with hard work, insufficient food, and an irregular and capricious severity, they had become discontented, sickly and inefficient. There never was a time that two or three of them, and sometimes many more, were not runaways, wandering in the woods; and hence originated further troubles, and fresh severity.

Mr Carleton had expressly directed, that his servants should receive an allowance of corn, and especially of meat, which in that part of the world was thought extremely liberal; and I believe, if the allowance had been faithfully distributed, the heartiest man upon the place would have received about half as much meat as was consumed by Mr Carleton's youngest daughter, a little girl some ten or twelve years old. But if the slaves were worthy of belief, neither Mr Warner's scales nor his measure were very authentic; and according to their story, so much as he could plunder out of their weekly allowance, went to increase his share in the yearly produce of the plantation.

Once or twice, complaints of this sort had been: carried to Mr Carleton; but without deigning to examine into them, he had dismissed them as unworthy of notice. Mr Warner, he said, was an honest man and a christian, — indeed it was his christian character that had first recommended him to his employer; — and these scandalous stories were only invented out of that spite which slaves always