on any one who should teach the slaves to read or write.
Virginia, however, permitted the owner to teach his slave in the
interest of better management of the plantation. North Carolina finally
consented to arithmetic. After 1831 and the Nat Turner negro
insurrection more stringent laws were passed to prevent the slaves
learning how to read, lest they chance upon abolition documents. A
Georgian planter said that "The very slightest amount of education
impairs their value as slaves, for it instantly destroys their
contentedness; and since you do not contemplate changing their
condition, it is surely doing them an ill service to destroy their
acquiescence in it." In spite of the law, however, domestic servants
were frequently taught to read. Frederick Douglass found a teacher in
his mistress, where he was held as a domestic slave, and Douglass in
turn taught his fellow slaves on the plantation by stealth. The
advertisements of slaves that mention the slave's ability to read and
cipher, as a reason for special value, prove that the more intelligent
slaves had at least the rudiments of knowledge. Olmstead, in his "Cotton
Kingdom," says he visited a plantation in Mississippi, where one of the
negroes had, with the full permission of his master, taught all his
fellows how to read.

An examination of the influence of slavery upon the poorer whites shows
that two-thirds of the white population suffered hardly less than did
the coloured people. The slaveholding class formed an aristocracy, who
dominated and ruled as lords. When the war broke out, there were about
four hundred thousand slave-holders, and nine and a half million people.
But of these four hundred thousand slave-holders, only about eight
thousand owned more than fifty slaves each, and it was this mere handful
who lived in splendid homes, surrounded with luxury, beauty, and
refinement. Travellers who have thrown the veil of romance and
enchantment about the Southern home, with a great house embowered in
magnolia trees, its rooms stored with art treasures, its walls lined
with marbles and bronzes, and its banqueting room at night crowded with
beautiful women and handsome men--these travellers speak of what was as
a matter of fact exceptional. We must remember that these men
represented a small aristocracy; that their mode of life, so charmingly
pictured by many accomplished writers, was the life of a select group,
and that the great slave plantations numbered not more