Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/360

 as it was. I had ascertained — so I told him — that the woman was pious, and that, apart from her dread of being separated from her child, she had a great horror of being sold for the New Orleans market, and I insisted that as a matter of religion and conscience, it was better to dispose of her, as I had done, to a private family, and most probably a kind mistress, than to sell her to the New Orleans slave trader. Here I thought I had my pious partner at advantage, and I followed it up by. quoting the text, 'Thou shalt not oppress the widow and the fatherless' Though I was not so well read in the Scriptures as Gouge, it came into my mind as quite to the purpose. But highly indignant that such a graceless fellow as I, who belonged to no church, and made no pretensions to have any religion, should presume to dictate him on that subject, Gouge turned upon me with a perfect fury. The text, he said, did not apply. He had once had a long talk on that very subject with Parson Softwords. As slaves could not be married, there could be — so the parson thought — no widows among them; and as to the children, not being born in lawful wedlock, they could not become fatherless, — for they had no fathers, — being in the eye of the law, as he had heard the learned Judge Hallett observe from the bench, the children of nobody. As to pious niggers, that was all moonshine; he did not believe in any such thing. He belonged, in fact, to a pretty numerous sect in these parts, called Anti-mission Baptists, or Hard Shells, who don't think the Lord ever intended the heathen to be converted, or negroes to be any thing but slaves, or any body to be saved except their own precious selves, and that entirely by faith and grace, wholly independent of works. As to the girl's making such a fuss about parting from her child, that, Gouge said, was a piece of great nonsense. Wasn't she young enough to have a dozen more?

"The upshot of the matter was, what with Gouge's brutality and purse-proud insolence, and my hot