m. The
slave is intelligent and capable, the husband of a wife and the father
of children, and they are all fondly attached to each other. He
passionately declares that he will kill himself rather than follow his
new master and leave wife and children behind. Roused by the storm of
grief, the wife opens the door of her room, and beholds her husband,
with his arms folded, advising his slave "not to make a fuss about what
there is no help for." The same master insists that there is no hardship
or injustice in whipping a woman who asks his wife to intercede for her,
but confesses that it is "disagreeable." At last he tells her that she
must no longer fatigue him with the "stuff" and "trash" which "the
niggers," who are "all d----d liars," make her believe, and
henceforward closes his ears to all complaint.

Yet this was a model plantation, and this was probably not a hard
master, as masters go. "These are the conditions which can only be known
to one who lives among them. Flagrant acts of cruelty may be rare, but
this ineffable state of utter degradation, this really _beastly_
existence, is the normal condition of these men and women; and of that
no one seems to take heed, nor had I ever heard it described so as to
form any adequate conception of it, till I found myself plunged into
it.... Industry, man's crown of honor elsewhere, is here his badge of
utter degradation; and so comes all by which I am here
surrounded,--pride, profligacy, idleness, cruelty, cowardice, ignorance,
squalor, dirt, and ineffable abasement."

And yet this is the system which we have been in the habit of calling
patriarchal, because the model masters said it was so, and trade was too
prosperous to allow any difference with them! And these are the model
masters, supported in luxury by all this unpaid labor and untold woe,
these women-whippers and breeders of babies for sale, who have figured
in our talk and imaginations as "the chivalry" and "gentlemen"! These
are they to whom American society has koo-too'd, and in whose presence
it has been ill-bred and uncourteous to say that every man has rights,
that every laborer is worthy of his hire, that injustice is unjust, and
uncleanness foul. No wonder that Russell, coming to New York, and
finding the rich men and the political confederates of the conspirators
declaring that the Government of the United States could not help
itself, and that they would allow no interference with their Southern
friends,