Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/166

 items amounted to a sum sufficient to swallow up half the usual profits of the plantation. Scarcely a day passed, that Mrs Montgomery was not pestered with complaints about the severity of her new overseer; and the servants were constantly coming to her to beg off from some threatened punishment. Two or three instances in which the overseer was checked for the tyrannical manner in which he exercised his authority, only served to increase this annoyance. She was perplexed with continual appeals, as to which she found it next to impossible to get at the truth; since the overseer always told one story, and the servants another, The second overseer was dismissed; a third threw up his place in disgust; and a fourth, who resolved to humor the indulgent disposition of his employer, suffered the hands to take their own course and to do pretty much as the pleased. Of course they did not care to work, while they had the choice of being idle. Every season, since Mrs Montgomery had commenced her experiments, the crop had fallen lamentably short; but that year, there was scarcely any crop at all.

Her friends now thought it time to interfere. Her brother, whom she loved, and for whose opinion and advice she entertained a high regard, had all along, remonstrated against the course she was pursuing. He now spoke in a more decided tone. He told her, that the silly notions she had taken up about the happiness of her slaves, would certainly ruin her. Where was the need of being more humane than her neighbors? — and what folly could be greater than to reduce herself and her children to beggary, in the vain pursuit of a sentimental and impracticable scheme?

Mrs Montgomery defended herself and her conduct with great earnestness. She pleaded her duty towards those unhappy beings whom God had placed in her power and under her protection. She even went so far as to hint at the injustice of living in luxury upon the fruits of forced labor; and she spoke with much feeling of the savage brutality of overseers, and the torture of the lash. Her brother replied, that such talk was very pretty, and generous, and philanthropic, and all that; and while it went no further than talk, he had not the least objection to it. But pretty