IF modern Christianity, as improved in our southern world-we mean
our world of slavery-had blushes, it might improve the use of them
were we to recount in detail the many painful incidents which the
improved and very christianly process of separating husbands from
wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters, and friends
from all the ties and associations the heart, gives birth to.
Negroes have tender sympathies, strong loves. Reader, we will save
your feelings,--we will not recount them; our aim is not to excite
undue feeling, but to relate every-day scenes.
Days and weeks pass on drearily with Marston. Unhappy, forlorn,
driven to the last extremity by obdurate creditors, he waits the
tardy process of the law. He seldom appears in public; for those who
professed to be his best friends have become his coldest
acquaintances. But he has two friends left,--friends whose pure
friendship is like sweetest dew-drops: they are Franconia and Daddy
Bob. The rusty old servant is faithful, full of benevolence,
gratitude, and unshaken fidelity; the other is the generous woman,
in whose bosom beat the tender impulses of a noble soul. Those
impulses have been moved to action in defence of the innocent; they
never can be defeated. Bob is poor, abject, and old with toil. He
cares not to be free,--he wants mas'r free. But there yet remains
some value in Bob; and he has secreted himself, in hopes of escaping
the man-dealer, and sharing his earnings in the support of old
mas'r. Franconia is differently situated; yet she can only take
advantage of circumstances which yet depend upon the caprice of a
subtle-minded husband. Over both these friends of the unfortunate,
slavery has stretched its giant arms, confusing the social system,
uprooting the integrity of men, weakening respect for law, violating
the best precepts of nature, substituting passion for principle,
confounding reason, and enslaving public opinion.
Under the above disorganising state of the social compact, the
children, known to be Marston's, are pursued as property belonging
to the bankrupt estate. When the law has made it such, it must be
sold in satisfaction of Marston's debts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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