of which
everywhere sadden her eye and wring her heart, compel her to the
simplest narration. There is no writing for effect. There is not a
single "sensational" passage. The story is monotonous; for the wrong it
describes is perpetual and unrelieved. "There is not a single natural
right," she says, after some weeks' residence, "that is not taken away
from these unfortunate people; and the worst of all is, that their
condition does not appear to me, upon further observation of it, to be
susceptible of even partial alleviation, as long as the fundamental
evil, the Slavery itself, remains."

As the mistress of the plantation, she was brought into constant
intercourse with the slave-women; and no other account of this class is
so thorough and plainly stated. So pitiful a tale was seldom told. It
was a "model plantation"; but every day was darkened to the mistress by
the appeals of these women and her observation of their condition. The
heart of the reader sickens as hers despaired. To produce "little
niggers" for Massa and Missis was the enforced ambition of these poor
women. After the third week of confinement they were sent into the
fields to work. If they lingered or complained, they were whipped. For
beseeching the mistress to pray for some relief in their sad straits,
they were also whipped. If their tasks were unperformed, or the driver
lost his temper, they were whipped again. If they would not yield to the
embrace of the overseer, they were whipped once more. How are they
whipped? They are tied by the wrists to a beam or the branch of a tree,
their feet barely touching the ground, so that they are utterly
powerless to resist; their clothes are turned over their heads, and
their backs scarred with a leathern thong, either by the driver himself,
or by father, brother, husband, or lover, if the driver choose to order
it. What a blessing for these poor heathen that they are brought to a
Christian land! When a band of pregnant women came to their master to
implore relief from overwork, he seemed "positively degraded" to his
wife, as he stood urging them to do their allotted tasks. She began to
fear lest she should cease to respect the man she loved; "for the
details of slaveholding are so unmanly, letting alone every other
consideration, that I know not how any one with the spirit of a man can
condescend to them." The master gives a slave as a present to an
overseer whose administration of the estate was agreeable to hi