Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/197

 vindictive fury of the planters, backed by an abundant legislation, has not been able to eradicate. They are the chief support, in fact, the only means of livelihood, open to a considerable portion of the lower order of the white aristocracy of the country. It is the same in Carolina as in Lower Virginia. The poor whites are extremely rude and ignorant, and acquainted with but few of the comforts of civilized life. They are idle, dissipated, and vicious; with all that vulgar brutality of vice, which poverty and ignorance render so conspicuous and disgusting. Without land, or at best, possessing some little tract of barren and exhausted soil, which they have neither skill nor industry to render productive; without any trade or handicraft art; and looking upon all manual labor as degrading to freemen, and fit only for a state of servitude, — these poor white men have become the jest of the slaves, and are at once, feared and hated by the select aristocracy of rich planters. It is only the right of suffrage which they possess, that preserves them the show of consideration and respect with which they are yet treated. This right of suffrage, of which the select aristocracy are extremely anxious to deprive them, is the only safeguard of the poor whites. But for this, they would be trampled under foot without mercy; and by force of law and legislation, would soon be reduced to a condition little superior to that of the very slaves themselves.

On the Christmas holidays which succeeded my becoming an inhabitant of Loosahachee, a great number of slaves, of whom, I was one, were assembled about a little store on the neighboring high road, laughing, talking, drinking whiskey, and making merry after our several fashions. While we were thus employed, I observed riding along the road, a mean looking fellow, shabbily dressed, with a face of that disagreeable cadaverous hue that makes the inferior order of whites in Lower Carolina look so much like walking, corpses. He was mounted on a lean scraggy horse, whose hips seemed just bursting through the skin, and he carried in his hand an enormous whip, which he handled with a familiar grace, seldom acquired except by an American slave-driver. As he passed us, I noticed that all the slaves who had hats, pulled them off to him; but as I did not see