from
labor, and on that day there were three services which they had to
attend under penalty of a whipping. They were never allowed off the
plantation, and were whipped if they talked with slaves from other
plantations. Said a neighbor, "They can all repeat the catechism, but
they are the dullest, laziest, and most sorrowful negroes I ever saw."

As to the possibilities of gradual emancipation, which he favored,
Olmsted wrote that in Cuba every slave has the right of buying his own
freedom, at a price which does not depend on the selfish exaction of his
master, but is either a fixed price or is determined in each case by
disinterested appraisers. "The consequence is that emancipations are
continually going on, and the free people of color are becoming
enlightened, cultivated, and wealthy. In no part of the United States do
they occupy the high position which they enjoy in Cuba." So much for the
despised Spanish-American.

From a still different standpoint--that of the non-slaveholding
Southern white--the system was reviewed and scathingly judged in
Helper's _The Impending Crisis_. But that, like _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, was
not merely a book, but an event, and as such is to be mentioned in its
place among events. The general survey of the slave system in itself
need not here be carried further. As to its essential character and
basal principle, no truer word was ever spoken than that which Mrs.
Stowe puts in the mouth of the slaveholder St. Clare:

"The short of the matter is, cousin, on this abstract question of
slavery there can, as I think, be but one opinion. Planters,
who have money to make by it,--clergymen, who have planters to
please,--politicians, who want to rule by it,--may warp and bend
language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their
ingenuity; they can press Nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what
else, into the service; but, after all, neither they nor the world
believe in it one particle the more. It comes from the devil, that's the
short of it,--and to my mind, it's a pretty respectable specimen of what
he can do in his own line. You seem to wonder; but if you will get me
fairly at it, I'll make a clean breast of it. This cursed business,
accursed of God and man, what is it? Strip it of all its ornament, run
it down to the root and nucleus of the whole, and what is it? Why,
because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and
strong,--because I know how, and