Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/35

 in becoming respectable, so the business of an overseer is likely from its nature, always to continue contemptible and degraded. 'The young lady who dines heartily on lamb, has a sentimental horror of the butcher who killed it; and the slave owner who lives luxuriously on the forced labor of his slaves, has a like sentimental abhorrence of the man who holds the whip and compels the labor. He is like a receiver of stolen goods, who cannot bear the thoughts of stealing himself, but who has no objection to live upon the proceeds of stolen property. A thief is but a thief; an overseer but an overseer. The slave owner prides himself upon the honorable appellation of a planter; and the receiver of stolen goods assumes the _ character of a respectable shop-keeper. By such contemptible juggle do men deceive not themselves only, but oft-times the world also.

Mr Thomas Stubbs was overseer at Spring-Meadow, a person with whose name, appearance and character I was perfectly familiar, though hitherto I had been so fortunate as to have had very little communication with him.

He was a thick set, clumsy man, about fifty, with a little bullet head, covered with short tangled hair, and stuck close upon his shoulders. His face was curiously mottled and spotted, for what with sunshine, what with whiskey, and what with ague and fever, brown, red and sallow seemed to have put in a joint claim to the possession of it, without having yet been able to arrive at an amicable partition. He was generally to be seen on horseback, leaning forward over his saddle, and brandishing a long thick whip of twisted cow-hide, which from time to time, he applied over the head and shoulders of some unfortunate slave. If you were within hearing, his conversation, or rather his commands and observations, would have appeared a string of oaths, from the midst of which it was not very easy to disentangle his meaning. Some such exclamations were pretty sure to begin every sentence, and others to end it. It was however, only when Mr Stubbs had sole possession of the field, that he sprinkled his orders with this strong spice of brutality; — for when colonel Moore or any other gentleman happened to be riding by, he could assume quite an air