Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/338

 boy in the city of Charleston of sixteen years old and upwards could enlighten them, — it is not these little peccadilloes that reflect any thing upon Mr Johnson's character. They are as much parts of our domestic institutions here at the south as the use of the cowhide; just as natural to us southerners as chewing tobacco; just about as common, and just as little thought of. But the pinch is here. Mr. Johnson, being a bachelor, with no white wife or white children to control him, and, withal, one of the best-natured men in the world, must needs so far imitate the example of the patriarchs as actually to recognize a number of colored daughters as his own children. He has raised and educated them in his own house. He has even made efforts to introduce them into respectable society. The spirit of the Kentucky women — the women, you know, are all natural aristocrats — defeated Bim in that; but he has procured white husbands for them, and their children, under the law of Kentucky, will be legally white, and entitled to all the rights and privileges of white persons. It is this in which the scandal of Mr Johnson's conduct consists. If, instead of acting the affectionate father by his daughters, he had quietly shipped them all off to New Orleans to be sold at auction, to be made concubines of by the purchasers, instead of marrying them respectably, and securing for their children the full privileges of Kentucky citizenship, we should never have heard that brought against him, either north or south, as a reason why he ought not to be vice-president. I do not imagine that either of our northern friends here would have made the least objection to him on that score!"

"But you don't undertake to say," stammered out the Boston cotton broker, "that any respectable man at the south does that? That, I thought, was one of the slanders of the abolitionists."

"I do undertake to say," was the answer, "that a man may do it without any tarnish to his respectability, and if he should apply the next day after to