previous next


[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;

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Jamaica, L. I. (New York, United States) (1)
Georgia (Georgia, United States) (1)
Canada (Canada) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Sue (1)
Scotchmen (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: