ed at the apparent contradictions of
Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle
patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease
and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and
unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The
answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same
shield; they are different shields. They are pictures, on the one hand, of
house service in the great country seats and in the towns, and on the
other hand of the field laborers who raised the great tobacco, rice, and
cotton crops. We have thus not only carelessly mixed pictures of what were
really different kinds of slavery, but of that which represented different
degrees in the development of the economic system. House service was the
older feudal idea of personal retainership, developed in Virginia and
Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had all the
advantages and disadvantages of such a system; the advantage of the strong
personal tie and disadvantage of unyielding caste distinctions, with the
resultant immoralities. At its worst, however, it was a matter primarily
of human relationships.

Out of this older type of slavery in the northern South there developed,
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the southern South the
type of slavery which corresponds to the modern factory system in its
worst conceivable form. It represented production of a staple product on a
large scale; between the owner and laborer were interposed the overseer
and the drivers. The slaves were whipped and driven to a mechanical task
system. Wide territory was needed, so that at last absentee landlordship
was common. It was this latter type of slavery that marked the cotton
kingdom, and the extension of the area of this system southward and
westward marked the aggressive world-conquering visions of the slave
barons. On the other hand it was the milder and far different Virginia
house service and the personal retainership of town life in which most
white children grew up; it was this that impressed their imaginations and
which they have so vividly portrayed. The Negroes, however, knew the other
side, for it was under the harsher, heartless driving of the fields that
fully nine-tenths of them lived.

There early began to be some internal development and growth of
self-consciousness among the Negroes: for instance, in New En