Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1900: Vol. 56, Nov. 1899 to April, 1900Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1900: Vol. 56, Nov. 1899 to April, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
It is impossible to conceive of a more effective schooling for the
African people than was given this adoption into the households, and
often into the hearts, of high-minded masters. A like opportunity never
before came and will never again come to so lowly a folk. The effect
of this educative contact with the superior race is, as before noted,
to be seen in the temper of the negroes during and after the civil
war. Upon the high-minded master the effect of the institution was in
many ways enlarging. A man is morally what his cares have made him,
and of these the dutiful slaveholder has more than an average share.
He grew in the power of command and in the habit of doing justice to
many fellow-beings. He lived a large life. The qualities bred of his
station have been of profit to his folk and time. All this is true of
slavery of the domestic sort. It is not so in like manner of the great
plantations which came with the development of the cotton and sugar
industries. It was characteristic of the northern part of the South
until it began to be the place of supply for the rapidly developing
plantation district.
So long as the negro could look forward to life in the place and
with the people of his birth his simple, careless nature opened to
him little to bring a sense of danger. He was to live on until he
passed in to the Elysium of the hereafter, of which he had no doubt
whatever. Gradually there came, in the overcrowding of the farms and
the diminishing fertility of the wasted land, the need of reducing
the number of slaves. Then each year came the dreaded visits of the
"trader," who was like a visible angel of death, to lead one or more
into the far unknown country. Before the plantation demand for slaves
began there were, of course, sales of slaves, but they commonly went as
families, and not to places to them inconceivably remote. These could
hope for Christmas reunions and other exchanges, but when the negro
was "sold South" the place and people that had known him would know him
no more. My first impression of the iniquity of slavery came from the
anxious questions of negroes as to the danger of their being sold to
Alabama, that State being then the supposed destination of all those
who were out of favor. They naturally strove to make interest with
children whom they thought could successfully intercede for them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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