This forms a fine picture of the effects of slavery upon human relations![1]
I have more than once heard people, who had just returned from the South, speak of seeing a number of mulattoes in attendance where they visited, whose resemblance to the head of the family was too striking not to be immediately observed. What sort of feeling must be excited in the minds of those slaves by being constantly exposed to the tyranny or caprice of their own brothers and sisters, and by the knowledge that these near relations will, on a division of the estate, have power to sell them off with the cattle?
But the vices of white men eventually provide a scourge for themselves. They increase the negro race, but the negro can never increase theirs; and this is one great reason why the proportion of colored population is always so large in slave-holding countries. As the ratio increases more and more every year, the colored people must eventually be the stronger party; and when this result happens, slavery must either be abolished, or government must furnish troops, of whose wages the free States must pay their proportion.
As a proof of the effects of slavery on the temper, I will relate but very few anecdotes.
The first happened in the Bahamas. It is extracted from a despatch of Mr Huskisson to the Governor of those islands: "Henry and Helen Moss have been found guilty of a misdemeanor, for their cruelty to their slave Kate; and those facts of the case, which seem beyond dispute, appear to be as follows:
"Kate was a domestic slave, and is stated to have been guilty of theft: she is also accused of disobedience, in refusing to mend her clothes and do her work; and this was the more immediate cause of her punishment. On the twentysecond of July, eighteen hundred and twentysix, she was confined in the stocks, and she was not released till the eighth of August following, being
- ↑ A short time ago a reverend and very benevolent gentleman suggested as the subject of a book, The Beauty of Human Relations. What a bitter jest it would be, to send him this volume, with the information that I had complied with his request!
