The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 70, August, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 70, August, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
susceptible of even partial alleviation, as long as the fundamental
evil, the Slavery itself, remains."
As the mistress of the plantation, she was brought into constant
intercourse with the slave-women; and no other account of this class is
so thorough and plainly stated. So pitiful a tale was seldom told. It
was a "model plantation"; but every day was darkened to the mistress by
the appeals of these women and her observation of their condition. The
heart of the reader sickens as hers despaired. To produce "little
niggers" for Massa and Missis was the enforced ambition of these poor
women. After the third week of confinement they were sent into the
fields to work. If they lingered or complained, they were whipped. For
beseeching the mistress to pray for some relief in their sad straits,
they were also whipped. If their tasks were unperformed, or the driver
lost his temper, they were whipped again. If they would not yield to the
embrace of the overseer, they were whipped once more. How are they
whipped? They are tied by the wrists to a beam or the branch of a tree,
their feet barely touching the ground, so that they are utterly
powerless to resist; their clothes are turned over their heads, and
their backs scarred with a leathern thong, either by the driver himself,
or by father, brother, husband, or lover, if the driver choose to order
it. What a blessing for these poor heathen that they are brought to a
Christian land! When a band of pregnant women came to their master to
implore relief from overwork, he seemed "positively degraded" to his
wife, as he stood urging them to do their allotted tasks. She began to
fear lest she should cease to respect the man she loved; "for the
details of slaveholding are so unmanly, letting alone every other
consideration, that I know not how any one with the spirit of a man can
condescend to them." The master gives a slave as a present to an
overseer whose administration of the estate was agreeable to him. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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