em if they could find it, for the slaves are not mine, they are
Mr. ----'s.

The mulatto woman, Sally, accosted me again to-day, and begged that she
might be put to some other than field labour. Supposing she felt herself
unequal to it, I asked her some questions, but the principal reason she
urged for her promotion to some less laborious kind of work was, that
hoeing in the field was so hard to her on '_account of her colour_,' and
she therefore petitions to be allowed to learn a trade. I was much puzzled
at this reason for her petition, but was presently made to understand that
being a mulatto, she considered field labour a degradation; her white
bastardy appearing to her a title to consideration in my eyes. The
degradation of these people is very complete, for they have accepted the
contempt of their masters to that degree that they profess, and really
seem to feel it for themselves, and the faintest admixture of white blood
in their black veins appears at once, by common consent of their own race,
to raise them in the scale of humanity. I had not much sympathy for this
petition. The woman's father had been a white man who was employed for
some purpose on the estate. In speaking upon this subject to Mrs. G----,
she said that, as far as her observation went, the lower class of white
men in the south lived with coloured women precisely as they would at the
north with women of their own race; the outcry that one hears against
amalgamation appears therefore to be something educated and acquired,
rather than intuitive. I cannot perceive in observing my children, that
they exhibit the slightest repugnance or dislike to these swarthy
dependents of theirs, which they surely would do if, as is so often
pretended, there is an inherent, irreconcilable repulsion on the part of
the white towards the negro race. All the southern children that I have
seen seem to have a special fondness for these good-natured childish human
beings, whose mental condition is kin in its simplicity and proneness to
impulsive emotion to their own, and I can detect in them no trace of the
abhorrence and contempt for their dusky skins which all questions of
treating them with common justice is so apt to elicit from American men
and women.

To-day, for the first time since I left the Rice Island, I went out
fishing, but had no manner of luck. Jack rowed me up Jones's Creek, a
small stream which separates St. Simon's from the main, on the opposite
side fr