Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/135

 feel against an overseer, who compels them to do their duty. It might be so; I cannot undertake positively to contradict it. Yet I know that these imputations upon Mr Warner's honesty were not confined to the plantation, but circulated pretty freely through the neighborhood; and if he was not a rogue, Mr Carleton, by an unlimited, unsuspicious and unwise confidence, did his best to make him so.

Whether the slaves were cheated or not, of their allow- ance, there.is no dispute that they were worked hard, and harshly treated. Mr Carleton always took sides with his overseer, and was in the habit of maintaining that it was impossible to get along on a plantation without frequent whipping and a good deal of severity; and yet, as he was naturally good natured, it gave him pain to hear of any very flagrant instance of it. But he was much from home; and that kept him ignorant, to a great degree, of what was going on there; and for the rest, the overseer was anxious to save his feelings, and had issued very strict orders, which he enforced with merciless severity, that nobody should run to the House with tales of what was done upon the planta- tion. By this ingenious device, though a very common one, Mr Warner had every thing in his own way. In fact, Mr Carleton had as little control over his plantation as over any other in the county; and he knew just as little about it.

When my master was a young man, he had betted at horse-races,and gambling-tables, and spent money very freely in a thousand foolish ways. Since he had grown religious he had dropped these expenses, but he had fallen into others. It was no small sum that he spent every year, upon Bibles, church repairs, and other pious objects. For several years his income had been diminishing; but without any corresponding diminution of his expenses. As a natural consequence, he had become deeply involved in debt. His overseer had grown rich, while he had been growing poor. His lands and slaves were mortgaged, and he began to be plagued by the sheriff's officer. But these perplexities did not cause him to forego his spiritual la- bors, which he prosecuted, if possible, more diligently than before. i