eased
to visit his house. But the bitterest effect of this weak and culpable
abdication of his rights was experienced by his slaves. Sad indeed for
them was the change from the ease and abundance of the bachelor's-hall,
where slavery meant little more than a happy exemption from care, to
their present condition, in which it meant hopeless submission to the
power of a capricious and cruel mistress. The worst form of female
tyranny is that exhibited on a Southern plantation, under the sway of a
termagant. Her power to afflict is so complete and all-pervading, that
not an hour, nay, hardly a minute of the victim's life is exempt, if
the disposition exist to exercise it. Besides, this species of domestic
oppression has this in common with all the worst tyrannies which have
been most feared and hated by men: the severities are ordered by those
who neither execute them nor witness their execution,--that being
left to agents, usually hardened to their office, and who dare not be
merciful, even if so inclined. It adds two-fold to the bitterness of
such tyranny, that the tyrant is able to acquire a sort of exemption
from the weakness of pity. It is wisely ordered that few human beings
shall feel aught but pain in looking upon the extreme bodily anguish of
their fellow-men; and when a monster appears who seems to contradict
this benign law, he is embalmed as a monster, and transmitted to future
times along with such _rara aves_ as Caligula, Domitian, and Nana Sahib.
And here--as a Southern man, brought up in the midst of a household of
slaves--let me remark, that the worst feature of our system of slavery
is the possibility of the negroes falling into the hands of a brutal
owner capable of exercising all the power of inflicting misery which the
law gives him.

But the natural law of compensation is universal; and if the most
wretched object in existence be a slave subject to the sway of a brutal
owner, certainly the next is the humane master who has to do with a
sullen, malicious, or dishonest negro,--while for one instance of the
former, there are a hundred of the latter who would willingly give up
the whole value of their human chattels in order to get rid of the
vexations they occasion. And where master and man were equally bad, we
have known cases in which it was really hard to say which contrived to
inflict most misery: the one might get used to blows and curses so as
not much to mind them, but the other could never escape t