[158] Southern slavery. They have acquired the reputation, both among the Southerners and Africans, of being the most merciless of negro task-masters. Englishmen, Scotchmen and Germans, with very few exceptions, are either secret abolitionists or silent neutrals. An Englishman is treated with far more and sincerer respect by the slaves than any American. They have heard of Jamaica; they have sighed for Canada. I have seen the eyes of the bondmen in the Carolinas sparkle as they talked of the probabilities of a war with the “old British.” A war with England Now, would, in all probability, extinguish Southern slavery forever.
A Southern requiem.
It is sad to hear a slaveholder, of the less educated class, speak in eulogy of a negro who has gone to the world where the weary are at rest. It is sickening to think, as he recounts their virtues, that he never could have regarded them as immortal souls; that their value in his eyes consisted solely of their animal or mechanical excellences; that he measured a human servant by the self-same standard with which he gauged his horses and his cattle. One day, after listening to a conversation of this character — not in Georgia, however, but another Slave State--I endeavored to put a slaveholder's post-mortem praises into rhyme — to write a requiem for a valued or valuable slave. Here it is:I.
Haste! bury her under the meadow's green lea,
My faithful old black woman Sue;
There never was negro more useful than she,
There never was servant more true;