laborer falls sick or is unable to do his work the farmer has simply to
hire another hand. It is as much the interest of a planter to keep his
slaves in good health and spirits as it is for a farmer to feed and
attend to his horses properly.

"Of the two, I consider that the slave with a fairly kind master is to
the full as happy as the ordinary English laborer. He certainly does not
work so hard, if he is ill he is carefully attended to, he is well fed,
he has no cares or anxieties whatever, and when old and past work he has
no fear of the workhouse staring him in the face. At the same time I am
quite ready to grant that there are horrible abuses possible under the
laws connected with slavery.

"The selling of slaves, that is to say, the breaking up of families and
selling them separately, is horrible and abominable. If an estate were
sold together with all the slaves upon it, there would be no more
hardship in the matter than there is when an estate changes hands in
England, and the laborers upon it work for the new master instead of the
old. Were I to liberate all the slaves on this estate to-morrow and to
send them North, I do not think that they would be in any way benefited
by the change. They would still have to work for their living as they do
now, and being naturally indolent and shiftless would probably fare much
worse. But against the selling of families separately and the use of the
lash I set my face strongly.

"At the same time, my boy, whatever your sentiments may be on this
subject, you must keep your mouth closed as to them. Owing to the
attempts of Northern Abolitionists, who have come down here stirring up
the slaves to discontent, it is not advisable, indeed it is absolutely
dangerous, to speak against slavery in the Southern States. The
institution is here, and we must make the best we can of it. People here
are very sore at the foul slanders that have been published by Northern
writers. There have been many atrocities perpetrated undoubtedly, by
brutes who would have been brutes wherever they had been born; but to
collect a series of such atrocities, to string them together into a
story, and to hold them up, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has, as a picture of
slave life in the Southern States, is as gross a libel as if anyone were
to make a collection of all the wife-beatings and assaults of drunken
English ruffians, and to publish them as a picture of the average life
of English people.

"Such libels