ies, might very well consider themselves so; and
I will, with your permission, contrast some of the items of my observation
with those of the traveller whose report you find so satisfactory on the
subject of the 'consolations' of slavery.

And first, for the attachment which he affirms to subsist between the
slave and master. I do not deny that certain manifestations on the part of
the slave may suggest the idea of such a feeling; but whether upon better
examination it will be found to deserve the name, I very much doubt. In
the first place, on some of the great Southern estates, the owners are
habitual absentees, utterly unknown to their serfs, and enjoying the
proceeds of their labour in residences as remote as possible from the
sands and swamps where their rice and cotton grow, and their slaves bow
themselves under the eye of the white overseer, and the lash of the black
driver. Some of these Sybarites prefer living in Paris, that paradise of
American republicans, some in the capitals of the middle states of the
union, Philadelphia or New York.

The air of New England has a keen edge of liberty, which suits few
Southern constitutions; and unkindly as abolition has found its native
soil and native skies, that is its birthplace, and there it flourishes, in
spite of all attempts to root it out and trample it down, and within any
atmosphere poisoned by its influence no slaveholder can willingly draw
breath. Some travel in Europe, and few, whose means permit the contrary,
ever pass the entire year on their plantations. Great intervals of many
years pass, and no master ever visits some of these properties: what
species of attachment do you think the slave entertains for him? In other
cases, the visits made will be of a few days in one of the winter months;
the estate and its cultivators remaining for the rest of the year under
the absolute control of the overseer, who, provided he contrives to get a
good crop of rice or cotton into the market for his employers, is left to
the arbitrary exercise of a will seldom uninfluenced for evil, by the
combined effects of the grossest ignorance and habitual intemperance. The
temptation to the latter vice is almost irresistible to a white man in
such a climate, and leading an existence of brutal isolation, among a
parcel of human beings as like brutes as they can be made. But the owner
who at these distant intervals of months or years revisits his estates, is
looked upon as a returning