It has been my painful duty to officiate on funeral occasions, while in the South, and never have I seen grief so deep and genuine as that of the slaves whose master or mistress had gone to the place appointed to all living.
We have said that the abolitionists are grossly ignorant of the present condition of the slaves in the South, and their treatment, and no doubt much of their hostility is the result of their ignorance.
This is an important subject, and should be well understood.—During my residence in the South, which was several years, I for the most part spent my time on large cotton and sugar plantations, on which were hundreds of negroes; and I went there with the prejudice and feelings of the North in reference to slavery, and I looked in vain for those scenes of horror and cruelty of which I had read and heard in my childhood; but I saw them not. I found to my surprise that the slaves of the South—and this I solemnly affirm—are better fed and better lodged than the free negroes of the North; and these slaves are far happier than the others. See them where you will, in the field, or in their quarters, you see them happy, merry and contented; and instead of the midnight sighs and groans issuing from their quarters, of which we are told so much, I can appeal to Heaven that I have never heard any thing but the merry laugh, ringing on the midnight air. And more, they are not only better fed and lodged and clothed, as well as happier, than the free blacks of the North, but they are ten times more polite, mannerly, genteel, intelligent and moral, than those dogged impudent, insolent, profane and filthy creatures that swarm about the towns and cities of the North, and from which our Jails and Alm-houses receive such large accessions. Another fact: the slaves of the South do not labor as hard as the white laborers of the North do. The former have their tasks assigned them, and when their tasks are done they may play or work for themselves. And I have known them, or the active ones among them, to finish their tasks againts three or four o’clock in the afternoon; and then they had the cool of the day to labor for themselves; and for this purpose every cabin, every head of a family, has a lot of ground allowed him, on which he raises whatever he chooses—corn, or cotton, or vegetables, or tobacco—the whole of which he is allowed; and hence, there are slaves in the South who have made as much money as would buy themselves, and strange to say, not one in twenty avail themselves of this opportunity. I have said that the slaves in the South are more moral than the blacks at the North. This is indeed true. The former are more lively and inquiring; and in point of morals, they are decidedly superior to the free blacks of the North. You see none of that profligacy, drunkenness and brutality, and hear none of that obscenity and profanity among the slaves of the South which you see and hear among the others. And I have always discovered that those slaves who were truly religious, were always the most devoted
