which may be easily aggravated into serious complaints, renders many of them nearly valueless for work, because of the ease with which they can impose upon their owners. "The women on a plantation," said one extensive Virginian slave-*owner to me, "will hardly earn their salt, after they come to the breeding age: they don't come to the field, and you go to the quarters, and ask the old nurse what's the matter, and she says, 'Oh, she's not well, master; she not fit to work, sir;' and what can you do? You have to take her word for it that something or other is the matter with her, and you dare not set her to work; and so she lay up till she feels like taking the air again, and plays the lady at your expense."
I was on a plantation where a woman had been excused from any sort of labour for more than two years, on the supposition that she was dying of phthisis. At last the overseer discovered that she was employed as a milliner and dressmaker by all the other coloured ladies of the vicinity; and upon taking her to the house, it was found that she had acquired a remarkable skill in these vocations. She was hired out the next year to a fashionable dress-maker in town, at handsome wages; and as, after that, she did not again "raise blood," it was supposed that when she had done so before, it had been by artificial means. Such tricks every army and navy surgeon is familiar with.
The interruption and disarrangement of operations of labour, occasioned by slaves "running away," frequently causes great inconvenience and loss to those who employ them. It is said to often occur when no immediate motive can be guessed at for it—when the slave has been well treated, well fed, and not over-worked; and when he will be sure to suffer hardship from it, and be subject to severe punishment on his return, or if he is caught.
This is often mentioned to illustrate the ingratitude and
