live with him on the plantation owned by himself and his brother. After
no long period she left her husband, not taking the world into her
confidence as to her domestic affairs, but returning to the stage as a
dramatic reader, and passing into honored private life. After the
outbreak of the Civil War she published, with some reserves and some
additions, the journal she had kept during her life on the plantation.
As to her personal relations, except as touching the slaves, the book is
entirely reticent, but it is plain that slavery as she saw it made life
under those conditions literally intolerable. Below all special
cruelties, she writes, she felt the ever-present, vivid wrong of living
on the unpaid labor of servants. The special wrongs were constant. Thus
she describes the parting of a family of slaves, and the husband's awful
distress. She tells of the head-driver, Frank, an every way superior
man, left at some seasons in sole charge of the plantation; but his wife
was taken from him and made the mistress of the overseer. There was
Engineer Ned, intelligent and capable, and himself not badly treated,
but with a wife broken down by being driven to field work too soon after
the birth of a child. Half the women on the plantation were diseased
from the same cause. One woman brought to her mistress a pitiful tale of
such suffering. A little later the mistress learned that the woman, on
the ground that this visit had caused her day's labor to come short,
had received a flogging. She appealed to her husband, but he refused to
interfere. "To Mr. ----'s assertion of the justice of poor Theresa's
punishment, I retorted the manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced
labor; the brutal inhumanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a
woman, the mother of ten children; to exact from her toil which was to
maintain in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation. I
said I thought female labor of the sort exacted from these slaves, and
corporal chastizement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any
manly or humane man. Mr. ---- said he thought it was disagreeable, and
left me to my reflections with that concession." Presently he refused to
listen to any more such petitions from her. She writes: "A wild wish
rose in my heart that the river and the sea would swallow up and melt in
their salt waves the whole of this accursed property of ours."

The principal physical hardships, she writes, fell to the women. The
children