ficult to manage. To extort the services of such a slave, by mere severity, would always be hazardous, and often impossible. Drive him to despair, of which such a man in such circumstances, is easily susceptible, and he might violently end a life from which he derived no enjoyment, and court a death which offered him, at least, the pleasure of thwarting the hopes of a too greedy master. With such slaves, it has always been found necessary, to enter into a sort of compromise, a treaty of peace, in which, if the claims of the conqueror were largely provided for, some respect has also been paid to the rights and the happiness of the conquered. The claims of the master have been commuted for a monthly or daily tribute; and what else the slave could make or gain, has been relinquished to his own use. He has been further encouraged by the prospect of presently purchasing his freedom; or of obtaining it by the free gift of a master well satisfied with his services.

But though such slaves are very profitable, they are also, as has been above observed, very dangerous. Put thus upon a level with their masters, in all that constitutes the moral strength of men; keenly sensitive to the injustice that is done them, and to the unfair advantage that has been taken of their weakness, -they have ever been ready to burst into rebellion, have sometimes succeeded in overpowering their masters, and have often maintained a long, a bloody, and a doubtful contest.

All this is perfectly well understood at the south. A slave who can read is valuable on many accounts, and will sell for more money than one who cannot. A slave who can read, write, and compute, and who by reason of these accomplishments is able to fulfil the duties of a merchant's clerk, is plainly far more valuable than a mere field hand. One who understands the art of printing, an armorer, an apothecary, are evidently capable of performing more profitable operations, than he who knows only how to handle a hoe.

But well aware how dangerous such slaves would be, the privileged order have preferred to sacrifice profit to safety. In most of the slave holding states, it is specially enacted that no slave shall be taught to read. This inability to read, disqualifies them at once for all the higher occupations. Some few are rudely instructed in those simple handicrafts indispensable upon every plantation; but custom and public opinion, if not the law, imperiously forbid, that any slave should be bred up to the knowledge or practice of any of the superior arts. Some publishers of newspapers, in defect of white journeymen, introduced slaves into their offices as compositors; but the experiment was pronounced too dangerous, and they were obliged to relinquish it.

With the exception of those employed in domestic service, and in the few mechanic arts above mentioned, the great mass of the slaves are occupied in agriculture, which, for the most part, is prosecuted in the rudest possible way. This is a subject which will be more fully considered in a subsequent chapter. Every thing is done by main strength, and under the direction of an overseer. The slaves are confined to the constant repetition of a few simple mechanical acts; and continually employed as they are in this constant round of stupefying labor, which is not enlivened by hardly a single glimpse of art or intellect; thus shut out from the means and opportunity of exercising their higher faculties, no wonder that the soul falls into a deep and death-like slumber. Drugged with such a stupefying cup, so artfully administered, the soul murder if not complete, is closely approximated.

The

man loses his manhood, and is a man no longer. Those mental and moral capabilities which are his pride and glory, fall into abeyance, and apparently he dwindles down into something little better than a mere animal.

The domestic slaves, being constantly attendant upon their masters, and listeners to their daily conversation, cannot but pick up some crumbs of knowl

edge, and acquire a certain habit of reasoning and reflection. In consequence of these accomplishments they are feared, suspected, and very narrowly watched. In all the towns and villages of the south, the strictest regulations are established and enforced, by which among other things, the slaves are forbidden to leave their master's houses after an early hour in the evening, and in many other respects, are subjected to a constant system of the most prying and suspicious espionage.

Some writers misled by a spirit of patriotism, or deceived by views too superficial, have represented the system of American slavery as extremely mild, and quite a different thing from slavery in any other age or country. There is a difference it is true; but that difference is not favorable to us. It is easy to show, that in certain most essential points,-those fundamental points by which alone a social system ought to be judged,-American slavery is a far more deadly and disastrous thing, more fatal to all the hopes, the sentiments, the rights of humanity, than almost any other system of servitude which has existed in any other community.

Slavery as it existed among the ancient Greeks and Romans has been often referred to, as a system of the extremest severity, cruel beyond any thing to be found in modern times.* No doubt that system was bad enough. It would be well however, if other systems

were not worse.

The Roman master had the power of life and death over his slaves; but the slaves, in this respect, stood upon a level with the freemen; for the Roman husband and father had the same power over his wife and his children, and he might claim and exercise it, long after those children had passed the age of puberty, and even after they had attained to the highest honors and distinctions of the state. It is true that the laws do not confer an equal authority upon the American master; but it is equally true that the lives of his

* See Channing on Slavery.

slaves are not the less in his power. It is easy for the master to invent a thousand pretences for taking the life of any slave, against whom he may have conceived a prejudice. If he does not think it prudent to use the pistol or the knife, he needs only to have recourse to a somewhat more lingering process of torture, or starvation.

But the great distinction between the slavery of the ancient world and that of America is this. The Greek and Roman slaves, in the estimation of their masters and themselves, though slaves, were yet men. It was true doubtless, as Homer says, that the day a man became a slave he lost half his manly virtues. From the nature of things it must have been so; but manhood or a portion of it, remained, though darkened and eclipsed, still visible. To a certain extent at least, in point of knowledge, accomplishments, and the development of mind, the slaves stood upon a level with the free; and if there be something terrible in the idea, terrible because we need no preparation to comprehend it,-of a city sacked and plundered, and all its inhabitants, the noblest, the wealthiest, the delicate women, as well as the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, sold under the hammer of a military auctioneer, and thence dragged into servitude,we must recollect that the accomplishments, the knowledge, the refinement of these unhappy captives, furnished also many means of alleviating the calamity of servitude, and presently of escaping it altogether. The Athenian captives taken in the unlucky expedition against Syracuse, purchased their liberty by reciting the verses of Euripides. Slaves first cultivated the art of Latin poetry, and introduced at Rome an imitation of the Grecian drama. Such were Plautus and Terence, and almost all the elder Roman poets. All the arts which give comfort and refinement to life, and the mere practice of which confers a certain social distinction, music, poetry, literature in general, painting, medicine, education, and many others, were principally, or commonly practised by slaves, who

thus acquired favor, fame, freedom, and finally wealth and social elevation. Horace, educated at Athens among the sons of Roman nobles, and afterwards the friend and intimate of the lords of the empire, and the delight and pride of the Roman people, was the son of a freedman. Emancipations were frequent and were favored. The slave constantly had before his eyes the hope and the prospect of liberty; he thus had a noble object for which to live; and although there were in general, some political disqualifications which he could not expect to shake off from himself, wealth, consideration, and all the more common objects of human hopes and wishes, were still spread out before him; and for his children—and men live as much for their children as for themselves,—he had every thing to anticipate.

Undoubtedly the condition of the country slave, employed in agriculture, more nearly resembled that of slaves with us. But still there was an opening for talent and for hope. No slave was so low or miserable, that he might not aspire to freedom and to social elevation.

Under this system, there existed that compromise between the master and the slave, which has been explained above. If the slave lived and labored for his master, he also lived and labored for himself. He was secured by custom, which is stronger and more effectual than law, in the enjoyment of a peculium, or property of his own. The relation of master and slave lost to a certain degree, the character of pure despotism, and approached towards that of lord and vassal, patron and client; while the frequency of emancipation introduced into the relation of servitude, sentiments totally opposite to those which naturally spring from it.

There were gleams of benevolence and of gratitude; there was a twilight of good-will. Compared to a condition of freedom, it was as the gray morning dawn to the brilliancy of noon. Compared to the system of our own country, it is as that same morning dawn to the blackness of midnight.