Page:The cotton kingdom (Volume 2).djvu/394

 life insurance, per annum, makes the lowest wages of a negro, under the most favourable circumstances, sixty-two dollars a year (or five dollars a month), paid in advance, in the shape of food and clothing. The author, whose object is to prove that the slaveholder is not guilty, as Mrs. Stowe intimates, of stealing the negroes' labour, proceeds, as follows, to show that he pays a great deal more for it than Mrs. Stowe's neighbours in New England do, for the labour they hire:—

"If now we add to this (what every New-Englander who has lived at the South knows), that Quashy does not do more than one-third, or, at the very utmost, one-half as much work as an able-bodied labourer on a farm at the North; and that, for this he receives, besides the five dollars above mentioned, his food, clothing, and shelter, with medical attendance and nursing when sick, and no deduction for lost time, even though he should be sick for years, while the 'farm-hand' at the North gets only ten or twelve dollars, and has to clothe himself out of it, and pay his own doctor's and nurse's bill in sickness, to say nothing of lost time, I think we shall come to the conclusion if there has been stealing anywhere, it has not been from Quashy."—P. 25.

"I recollect, the first time I saw Quashy at work in the field, I was struck by the lazy, listless manner in which he raised his hoe. It reminded me of the working-beam of the engine on the steam-boat that I had just landed from—fifteen strokes a minute; but there was this difference: that, whereas the working-beam kept steadily at it, Quashy, on the contrary, would stop about every five strokes and lean upon his hoe, and look around, apparently congratulating himself upon the amount of work he had accomplished.

"Mrs. Stowe may well call Quashy 'shiftless.' One of my father's hired men—who was with him seven years—did more work in that time than an average negro would do in his whole life. Nay, I myself have done more work in a day,—and followed it up, too—than I ever saw a negro do, and I was considered remarkably lazy with the plough or hoe."—P. 142.