security and dependence, and you come to police machinery, such as you never find in towns under free government; citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public whippings of the subjects for accidental infractions of police ceremonies. I happened myself to see more direct expression of tyranny in a single day and night at Charleston than at Naples in a week; and I found that more than half the inhabitants of this town were subject to arrest, imprisonment, and barbarous punishment, if found in the streets without a passport after the evening gun-fire. Similar precautions and similar customs may be discovered in every larger town in the South.” Mr. Olmsted says that it is not in reality much better in the rural districts: that the apparent freedom of the slaves in those districts is the apparent freedom of convicts in a dockyard, an armed force, invested with more arbitrary and cruel power than any police in Europe, being always ready to act if not always in service. He adds that the security of the whites, however, depends less on the patrols than on the instinctive, habitual, and constant surveillance exercised by all the whites over all the blacks. He has seen a gentleman without commission or authority oblige negroes to shew their passports, merely because he did not recognise them as belonging to any of his neighbours. He has seen a white girl, twelve years old, stop a black man on the public road, demand to know whither he was going, and by whose authority, order him back to his plantation, and when he demurred, threaten to have him whipped. Fear has even driven the American Slave-owners into prac-
