ated
from all succour against them, they do not sleep under the white man's
roof, and, for politic reasons, pass the night away from their master's
abode. The house servants have no other or better allowance of food than
the field labourers, but have the advantage of eking it out by what is
left from the master's table,--if possible, with even less comfort in one
respect, inasmuch as no time whatever is set apart for their meals, which
they snatch at any hour and in any way that they can--generally, however,
standing or squatting on their hams round the kitchen fire; the kitchen
being a mere outhouse or barn with a fire in it. On the estate where I
lived, as I have mentioned, they had no sleeping-rooms in the house; but
when their work was over, they retired like the rest to their hovels, the
discomfort of which had to them all the additional disadvantage of
comparison with their owner's mode of living. In all establishments
whatever, of course some disparity exists between the accommodation of the
drawing-rooms and best bed-rooms and the servants' kitchen and attics; but
on a plantation it is no longer a matter of degree. The young women who
performed the offices of waiting and housemaids, and the lads who
attended upon the service of their master's table where I lived, had
neither table to feed at nor chair to sit down upon themselves; the 'boys'
lay all night on the hearth by the kitchen fire, and the women upon the
usual slave's bed--a frame of rough boards, strewed with a little moss off
the trees, with the addition perhaps of a tattered and filthy blanket. As
for the so-called privilege of marrying--surely it is gross mockery to
apply such a word to a bond which may be holy in God's sight, but which
did not prevent the owner of a plantation where my observations were made
from selling and buying men and their so-called wives and children into
divided bondage, nor the white overseer from compelling the wife of one of
the most excellent and exemplary of his master's slaves to live with
him--nor the white wife of another overseer, in her husband's temporary
absence from the estate, from barbarously flogging three _married_ slaves
within a month of their confinement, their condition being the result of
the profligacy of the said overseer, and probably compelled by the very
same lash by which it was punished. This is a very disgusting picture of
married life on slave estates: but I have undertaken to reply to the
stateme