in a backward state of
civilization. Slave youths of special promise, or when special purposes
were in view, might be bound as apprentices to craftsmen at a distance.
Thus James H. Hammond in 1859 apprenticed a fourteen-year-old mulatto boy,
named Henderson, for four years to Charles Axt, of Crawfordville, Georgia,
that he might be taught vine culture. Axt agreed in the indenture to feed
and clothe the boy, pay for any necessary medical attention, teach him his
trade, and treat him with proper kindness. Before six months were ended
Alexander H. Stephens, who was a neighbor of Axt and a friend of Hammond,
wrote the latter that Henderson had run away and that Axt was unfit to have
the care of slaves, especially when on hire, and advised Hammond to take
the boy home. Soon afterward Stephens reported that Henderson had returned
and had been whipped, though not cruelly, by Axt.[12] The further history
of this episode is not ascertainable. Enough of it is on record, however,
to suggest reasons why for the generality of slaves home training was
thought best.

[Footnote 12: MSS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]

This, rudimentary as it necessarily was, was in fact just what the bulk of
the negroes most needed. They were in an alien land, in an essentially
slow process of transition from barbarism to civilization. New industrial
methods of a simple sort they might learn from precepts and occasional
demonstrations; the habits and standards of civilized life they could only
acquire in the main through examples reinforced with discipline. These the
plantation regime supplied. Each white family served very much the function
of a modern social settlement, setting patterns of orderly, well bred
conduct which the negroes were encouraged to emulate; and the planters
furthermore were vested with a coercive power, salutary in the premises, of
which settlement workers are deprived. The very aristocratic nature of the
system permitted a vigor of discipline which democracy cannot possess. On
the whole the plantations were the best schools yet invented for the mass
training of that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the
American negroes represented. The lack of any regular provision for the
discharge of pupils upon the completion of their training was, of course, a
cardinal shortcoming which the laws of slavery imposed; but even in view
of this, the slave plantation regime, after having wrought the initia