I narrated the Red River episode, and asked if such things could not possibly occur.
"Yes," replied he, "but very rarely. I don't know a man, in my parish, that could do such a thing. There are two men, though, in, bad enough to do it, I believe; but it isn't a likely story, at all. In the first place, no coloured woman would be likely to offer any resistance, if a white man should want to seduce her."
After further conversation, he said, that a planter had been tried for injuring one of his negroes, at the court in his parish, the preceding summer. He had had a favourite, among his girls, and suspecting that she was unduly kind to one of his men, in an anger of jealousy he mutilated him. There was not sufficient testimony to convict him; "but," he said, "everybody believes he was guilty, and ought to have been punished. Nobody thinks there was any good reason for his being jealous of the boy."
I remarked that this story corroborated "Uncle Tom's Cabin;" it showed that it was all possible.
"Ah!" he answered, "but then nobody would have any respect for a man that treated his niggers cruelly."
I wondered, as I went into dinner, and glanced at the long rows of surly faces, how many men there were there whose passions would be much restrained by the fear of losing the respect of their neighbours.[1]
My original purpose had been to go high up Red River at this time, but the long delay in the boat's leaving New Orleans, and her slow passage, obliged me to change my plans. The
- ↑ John Randolph, of Roanoke, himself a slaveholder, once said, on the floor of Congress (touching the internal slave-trade): "What are the trophies of this infernal traffic? The handcuff, the manacles, the blood-stained cowhide. What man is worse received in society for being a hard master? Who denies the hand of sister or daughter to such monsters?"
