Manuel Pereira; Or, The Sovereign Rule of South CarolinaAdams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
General
Manuel Pereira; Or, The Sovereign Rule of South Carolina
Adams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
African Americans -- Fiction; Biographical fiction; Pereira, Manuel -- Fiction; South Carolina -- Fiction
seen the practical demonstrations painfully carried out. Those who
visited Boston for the recovery of Crafts and Ellen--whose mode of
escape is a romance in itself--were specimens of these “marshals.”
How they passed themselves off for gentlemen, we are at a loss to
comprehend.
During the day, the Messrs. Dusenberry and Dunn may be seen at times
watching about the wharves, and again in low grog-shops--then pimping
about the “Dutch beer-shops and corner-shops”--picking up, here and
there, a hopeful-looking nigger, whom they drag off to limbo, or extort
a bribe to let him go. Again, they act as monitors over the Dutch
corner-shops, the keepers of which pay them large sums to save
themselves the heavy license fine and the information docket. When they
are no longer able to pay over hush-money, they find themselves walked
up to the captain's office, to be dealt with according to the severe
penalty made and provided for violating the law which prohibits the sale
of liquor to negroes without an order. The failure to observe this law
is visited with fine and imprisonment,--both beyond their proportionate
deserts, when the law which governs the sale of liquor to white men is
considered. Things are very strictly regulated by complexions in South
Carolina. The master sets the most dissipated and immoral examples
in his own person, and allows his children not only to exercise their
youthful caprices, but to gratify such feelings as are pernicious to
their moral welfare, upon his slaves. Now, the question is, that knowing
the negro's power of imitation, ought not some allowance to be made
for copying the errors of his master? Yet such is not the case; for the
slightest deviation from the strictest rule of discipline brings condign
punishment upon the head of the offender.
CHAPTER V. MR. GRIMSHAW, THE MAN OF THE COUNTY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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