promise of pay,
and have had that pay prove a delusion. Certainly it is fair to judge of
a whole by a part. Given a bone, Professor Agassiz can draw the animal
of which the bone forms a part. Given many thousands of negroes, we
should be able to judge somewhat of four millions. Had Mr. Trollope seen
the thousands of octoroons and quadroons enslaved in the South by their
_own fathers_, it would have been more just in him to have attributed a
want of _self-control_ to the _masters_ of these four millions. We do
not know what Mr. Trollope means by 'the necessities of children.
Children need to be sheltered, fed, and clothed, and so do the negroes,
but here the resemblance ends; for whereas children can not take care of
themselves, the negro _can_, provided there is any opportunity to work.
It is scarcely to be doubted that temporary distress must arise among
fugitives in localities where labor is not plenty; but does this
establish the black man's incapacity? Revolutions, especially those
which are internal, generally bring in their train distress to laborers.
Then we are told that the slaves are endowed with the passions of men;
and very glad are we to know this, for, as a love of liberty and a
willingness to sacrifice all things for freedom, is one of the loftiest
passions in men, were he devoid of this passion, we should look with
much less confidence to assistance from the negro in this war of freedom
_versus_ slavery, than we do at present. In stating that the slaves are
as ignorant as savages, Mr. Trollope pays an exceedingly poor compliment
to the Southern whites, as it would naturally be supposed that constant
contact with a superior race would have civilized the negro to a
_certain_ extent, especially as he is known to be wonderfully imitative.
And such is the case; at least the writer of these lines, who has been
born and bred in a slave State, thinks so. As a whole, they compare very
favorably with the 'poor white trash,' and individually they are vastly
superior to this 'trash.' It is true, that they can not read or write,
not from want of aptitude or desire, as the teachers among the
contrabands write that their desire to read amounts to a passion, in
many cases, even among the hoary-headed, but because the teaching of a
slave to read or write was, in the good old times before the war,
regarded and punished as a criminal offense. What a pity it is that we
can not go back to the Union _as it was!_ In this ignoran