But the most interesting spectacle is yet before you. It is
to be witnessed in the Infant School Room, nicely fitted up
and supplied with the customary cards and other
appurtenances. Here every day in the week, you may find
twenty-five or thirty children, neatly clad and wearing
bright and happy faces. And as you notice their correct
deportment, hear their unhesitating replies to the questions
proposed, and above all when they unite their sweet voices in
their touching songs, if your heart is not affected and your
eyes do not fill, you are the hardest-hearted and driest-eyed
visitor that has ever been there. But who is their teacher?
Their mistress, a lady whose amiable Christian character and
most gifted and accomplished mind and manners are surpassed
by none. From day to day, month to month, and year to year,
she has cheerfully left her splendid halls and circle of
friends, to visit her school room, where, standing up before
those young immortals, she trains them in the way in which
they should go, and leads them to Him who said, "suffer
little children to come unto me."
From the Infant School room, we will walk through a beautiful
lawn half a mile, to a pleasant grove commanding a view of
miles in extent. Here is a brick chapel, rising for the
accommodation of this interesting family; sufficiently large
to receive two or three hundred hearers. When completed, in
beauty and convenience it will be surpassed by few churches
in the Southern country.
On the plantation you might also see other things of great
interest. Here a negro is the overseer. Marriages are
regularly contracted. No negro is sold, except as a
punishment for bad behavior, and a dreaded one it is. None is
bought, save for the purpose of uniting families. Here you
will near no clanking of chains, no cracking of whips; (I
have never seen a blow struck on the estate,) and here last,
but not least, you will find a flourishing Temperance
Society, embracing almost every individual on the premises.
And yet the "Christianity of the South is a chain-forging, a
whip-plaiting, marriage discouraging, Bible-withholding
Christianity!"
I have confined myself to a single plantation. But I might
add many most interesting facts in regard to others, and the
state of feeling in general, but I forbear.
Yours, &c
A NEW ENGLAND MAN.
He would now connect the peculiar and local facts of the preceding
statement, with the whole community of slave holders, in the same
State, and show by competent and disinterested testimony, the real
and common state of things. The following extracts were from a letter
printed in the New York Observer, of July 25, 1835:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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