om. Erecting a small saw-mill, and a log shanty to shelter
himself and a few "hired" negroes, he attacked, with his own hands, the
mighty pines, whose brothers still tower in gloomy magnificence around
his dwelling.

From such beginnings he had risen to be one of the wealthiest land and
slave owners of his district, with vessels trading to nearly every
quarter of the globe, to the Northern and Eastern ports, Cadiz, the West
Indies, South America, and if I remember aright, California. It seemed
to me a marvel that this man, alone, and unaided by the usual appliances
of commerce, had created a business, rivalling in extent the
transactions of many a princely merchant of New York and Boston.

His "family" of slaves numbered about three hundred, and a more healthy,
and to all appearance, happy set of laboring people, I had never seen.
Well fed, comfortably and almost neatly clad, with tidy and well-ordered
homes, exempt from labor in childhood and advanced age, and cared for in
sickness by a kind and considerate mistress, who is the physician and
good Samaritan of the village, they seemed to share as much physical
enjoyment as ordinarily falls to the lot of the "hewer of wood and
drawer of water." Looking at them, I began to question if Slavery is, in
reality, the damnable thing that some untravelled philanthropists have
pictured it. If--and in that "_if_" my good Abolition friend, is the
only unanswerable argument against the institution--if they were taught,
if they knew their nature and their destiny, the slaves of such an owner
might unprofitably exchange situations with many a white man, who, with
nothing in the present or the future, is desperately struggling for a
miserable hand-to-mouth existence in our Northern cities. I say "of such
an owner," for in the Southern Arcadia such masters are "few and far
between"--rather fewer and farther between than "spots upon the sun."

But they are _not_ taught. Public sentiment, as well as State law,
prevents the enlightened master, who would fit the slave by knowledge
for greater usefulness, from letting a ray of light in upon his darkened
mind. The black knows his task, his name, and his dinner-hour. He knows
there is a something within him--he does not understand precisely
what--that the white man calls his soul, which he is told will not rest
in the ground when his body is laid away in the grave, but will--if he
is a "good nigger," obeys his master, and does the task allott