his business; people lost
confidence in him, and step by step he went down, till in five years he
sunk into a wretched grave. That was the effect of freedom on _him_, and
it would be the same on all of his race."

"It is clear," I replied, "_he_ could not bear freedom, but that does
not prove he might not have 'endured' it if he had never been a slave.
His overjoy at obtaining liberty, after so long a struggle for it, led
to his excesses and his ruin. According to your view, neither the black
nor the poor white is competent to take care of himself. The Almighty,
therefore, has laid upon _you_ a triple burden; you not only have to
provide for yourself and your children, but for two races beneath you,
the black and the clay-eater. The poor nigger has a hard time, but it
seems to me you have a harder one."

"Well, it's a fact, we do. I often think that if it wasn't for the color
and the odor, I'd willingly exchange places with my man Jim."

The Colonel made this last remark in a half-serious, half-comic way,
that excited my risibilities, but before I could reply, the carriage
stopped, and Jim, opening the door, announced:

"We's har, massa, and de prayin' am gwine on."

[Footnote I: The foregoing statistics are correct. That small number of
slave-holders sustains the system of slavery, and has caused this
terrible rebellion. They are, almost to a man, rebels and secessionists,
and we may cover the South with armies, and keep a file of soldiers upon
every plantation, and not smother this insurrection, unless we break
down the power of that class. Their wealth gives them their power, and
their wealth is in their slaves. Free their negroes by an act of
emancipation, or confiscation, and the rebellion will crumble to pieces
in a day. Omit to do it, and it will last till doomsday.

The power of this dominant class once broken, with landed property at
the South more equally divided, a new order of things will arise there.
Where now, with their large plantations, not one acre in ten is tilled,
a system of small farms will spring into existence, and the whole
country be covered with cultivation. The six hundred thousand men who
have gone there to fight our battles, will see the amazing fertility of
the Southern soil--into which the seed is thrown and springs up without
labor into a bountiful harvest--and many of them, if slavery is crushed
out, will remain there. Thus a new element will be introduced into the
South, an eleme