Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/168

 manner, to have any thing to do with the business, unless she would surrender to him the sole and exclusive management of her affairs. To these hard terms, after a short and ineffectual struggle, she was obliged to consent.

He immediately took the plantation into his own hands. He removed the cabins to their former situation; revived the old rule that no servant should ever go to the House unless specially sent for; reduced them to their former allowance of food and clothing; and engaged an overseer on the express condition that Mrs Montgomery should never listen to any complaints against him, or intermeddle, in any way, with his management of the plantation.

Within the first month after this return to the old system, near one third of the working hands were runaways. Mrs Montgomery's brother told her, that this was no more than might be expected; for the rascals had been so spoiled and indulged as to render them quite impatient of the necessary and wholesome severity of plantation discipline. After long searching, and a good deal of trouble and expense, the runaways, except one or two, were finally recovered; and Poplar-Grove, under its new administration, passed by degrees to its ancient routine of whipping and hard labor. Once in a while, notwithstanding all the pains that were taken to prevent it, some instance of severity would reach the ear of Mrs Montgomery; and in the first burst of indignant feeling, she would sometimes declare, that the narrowest poverty would be far better, than the wealth and luxury for which she was indebted to the whip of the slave-driver. But these exclamations of generous passion were scarcely uttered, before she acknowledged to herself, that to think of giving up the luxury to which she had been accustomed from her infancy, was out of the question. She strove to escape from the knowledge, and to banish the recollection of injustice and cruelty, which her heart condemned, but which she lacked the power, or rather the spirit, to remedy. She fled from a home, where she was forever haunted by the spectre of that delegated tyranny, for which, however she might attempt to deny or disguise it, she could not but feel herself responsible; and while her slaves toiled beneath the burning sun of a Carolina summer,