social purpose is very striking. It stands in marked contrast not only to the mock association of the slave with the master in the Saturnalia, but to sacrifices offered by the head of a family as its priest on behalf of the household. It is a holy meal at which the master must eat with the slave: its religious meaning is such as to secure that participation in it shall be a serious bond: it links together all who partake in it, by the memory of the most solemn event in the national history, to the destinies of the nation: it recalls the time when all the members of that nation were alike bondmen of the stranger in a foreign land. Never, surely, did Providence so thwart its own design, if the design of Providence was to widen and perpetuate the distinction between the freeman and the slave.
In America the slave is made a Christian in a sense of which we may have more to say hereafter. But practically he can scarcely be said to belong to the same Church any more than to the same State with his master. He sometimes sits in a separate part of the same place of worship, and receives the Communion separately from the same hands. But generally speaking, his religious exercises are carried on apart in his own quarters. Mr. Olmsted says, that “though family prayers were held in several of the fifty planters’ houses in Mississippi and Alabama, in which he passed a night, he never in a single instance saw a field-hand attend, or join in the devotion of the family.”[1] A friend of the present writer staying in the house of a planter who
- ↑ A Journey in the Back Country, p. 108.
