Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/369

 the British model, slavery having been superinduced thereupon as an excrescence or accessory; and, by tradition and habit, there still remain in those states — though fast dying out, under the influence of the slave breeding business — some good old wholesome English ideas. But the states of Alabama and Mississippi have been thoroughly slave states from the beginning, filled up by a colluvium of immigrants from the older slave states, mostly young men, who, in leaving their homes, would seem to have left behind them, as mere prejudices, every principle of humanity, justice, or moderation, ready, like so many ferocious sharks, to devour every thing and every body, and even each other. Nowhere in an part of the globe calling itself civilized, I doubt very much if any where, at any time, have ferocious enormities, and cold blooded murders, with pistols, rifles, and bowie knives, been so much a matter of everyday occurrence. Nowhere, between Lynch law committees on the one hand, and private murderers on the other, has life been so utterly insecure. As to the security of property, let the New York merchants who have traded to those states, let the English holders of Mississippi bonds, answer. Not that the holders of those bonds deserve any commiseration. Those securities were created — and the purchasers of them knew it, or ought to have known it — to raise funds with which to enable the Mississippi planters to increase their stock of slaves; and it is but a righteous retribution, that Englishmen who lent their money for so nefarious a purpose should be cheated out of every penny of it.

In the older slave states, the slaves living often on plantations on which they were born, and the connection between them and their owners being frequently hereditary, they cannot but establish certain ties of sympathy with those owners more or less strong, and customs of indulgence, and especially family relations among themselves, which have a partial operation to alleviate their condition. But in the