he boy Frank, the son of James Nixon; and in order to
gratify James have offered as far as five hundred dollars for him--more
than I would pay for any negro child in Georgia were it not James'
son."[45] It was therefore not wholly in idyllic strain that a South
Carolinian after long magisterial service remarked: "Experience and
observation fully satisfy me that the first law of slavery is that of
kindness from the master to the slave. With that ... slavery becomes a
family relation, next in its attachments to that of parent and child."[46]

[Footnote 44: Letter of E.N. Thompson, Vineville, Ga. (a suburb of Macon),
to J.B. Lamar at Macon, Ga., Aug. 7, 1854. MS. in the possession of Mrs.
A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]

[Footnote 45: Letter of Henry Jackson, Jan. 11, 1837, to Howell Cobb. MS.
in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]

[Footnote 46: J.B. O'Neall in J.B.D. DeBow ed., _Industrial Resources of
the South and West_, II (New Orleans, 1852), 278.]

On the whole, the several sorts of documents emanating from the Old
South have a character of true depiction inversely proportioned to their
abundance and accessibility. The statutes, copious and easily available,
describe a hypothetical regime, not an actual one. The court records are on
the one hand plentiful only for the higher tribunals, whither questions of
human adjustments rarely penetrated, and on the other hand the decisions
were themselves largely controlled by the statutes, perverse for ordinary
practical purposes as these often were. It is therefore to the letters,
journals and miscellaneous records of private persons dwelling in the
regime and by their practices molding it more powerfully than legislatures
and courts combined, that the main recourse for intimate knowledge must be
had. Regrettably fugitive and fragmentary as these are, enough it may be
hoped have been found and used herein to show the true nature of the living
order.

The government of slaves was for the ninety and nine by men, and only for
the hundredth by laws. There were injustice, oppression, brutality and
heartburning in the regime,--but where in the struggling world are these
absent? There were also gentleness, kind-hearted friendship and mutual
loyalty to a degree hard for him to believe who regards the system with a
theorist's eye and a partisan squint. For him on the other hand who has
known the considerate and cordial, courteous and charming men and women,
white and black, w