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coast of Africa, snatched from some cannibal's calaboose,--where else they might have been butchered to make a Dahomeyan holiday,--and set up in a country gentleman's kitchen in Maryland, where they and their Christian progeny helped to make many a happy Christmas. Of this antique Ethiopian couple I remember nothing,--they died long before I was born,--nor have I gathered any notable _ana_ concerning them. Only of the father, I learned from my darling old nurse that he was one hundred and four years old when the Almighty Emancipator set him free; and from my father, and the brothers and sisters of my mother, that he possessed in a remarkable degree those simple, childlike virtues, characteristic of the original domesticated African, which his daughters Judith and Rachel so richly inherited. Aunt Judy was one of many slaves set free by my grandfather's will, partly in reward of faithful service, partly from an impulse of conscientiousness; for our fine old Maryland gentleman was that social and political phenomenon, a slaveholder with a practical scruple. Not that he doubted the moral wholesomeness of the "institution," which, in his theory, was patriarchal and protective, and in his practice eminently beneficent;--if he were living this day, I doubt not he would be found among its most earnest and confident champions;--but he did not believe in holding human beings in bondage "on principle," as it were, and for the mere sake of bondage. The patriarchal element was, he thought, an essential in the moral right of the system, and _that_ no longer necessary, the system became wrong. Therefore, so soon as it became clear to him that he (so peculiarly had God blessed him) could protect, advise, relieve his servants as effectually, they being free, as if their persons and their poor little goods, their labor and almost their lives, were at his disposal, he set them at liberty without asking the advice, or caring for the opinion, of any man; and by the same instrument which gave them the right to work, think, live, and die for themselves, he imposed upon his children a solemn responsibility for their well-being, in the future as in the past,--the honorable care of seeing to it that their wants were judiciously provided for, their training virtuous, their instruction useful, their employers just, their families united, and their homes happy. Those who were already of age went forth free at once; the minors received their "pap
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