ildren; the industrious and
money loving can make a few dollars; the great wrestler can win laurels;
the young people can meet, and enjoy each other's society; the drunken
man can get plenty of whisky; and the religious man can hold prayer
meetings, preach, pray and exhort during the holidays. Before the
holidays, these are pleasures in prospect; after the holidays, they
become pleasures of memory, and they serve to keep out thoughts and
wishes of a more dangerous character. Were slaveholders at once
to abandon the practice of allowing their slaves these liberties,
periodically, and to keep them, the year round, closely confined to the
narrow circle of their homes, I doubt not that the south would blaze
with insurrections. These holidays are conductors or safety valves to
carry off the explosive elements inseparable from the human mind,
when reduced to the condition of slavery. But for these, the rigors of
bondage would become too severe for endurance, and the slave would
be forced up to dangerous desperation. Woe to the slaveholder when
he undertakes to hinder or to prevent the operation of these electric
conductors. A succession of earthquakes would be less destructive,
than the insurrectionary fires which would be sure to burst forth in
different parts of the south, from such interference.

Thus, the holidays, became part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrongs
and inhumanity of slavery. Ostensibly, they are institutions of
benevolence, designed to mitigate the rigors of slave life, but,
practically, they are a fraud, instituted by human selfishness, the
better to secure the ends of injustice and oppression. The slave's
happiness is not the end sought, but, rather, the master's{197} safety.
It is not from a generous unconcern for the slave's labor that this
cessation from labor is allowed, but from a prudent regard to the safety
of the slave system. I am strengthened in this opinion, by the fact,
that most slaveholders like to have their slaves spend the holidays in
such a manner as to be of no real benefit to the slaves. It is plain,
that everything like rational enjoyment among the slaves, is frowned
upon; and only those wild and low sports, peculiar to semi-civilized
people, are encouraged. All the license allowed, appears to have no
other object than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom,
and to make them as glad to return to their work, as they were to
leave it. By plunging them into exhausting depths