American Negro Slavery Part 43

[Footnote 44: Letter of E.N. Thompson, Vineville, Ga. (a suburb of Macon), to J.B. Lamar at Macon, Ga., Aug. 7, 1854. MS. in the possession of Mrs.

A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]

[Footnote 45: Letter of Henry Jackson, Jan. 11, 1837, to Howell Cobb. MS.

in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]

[Footnote 46: J.B. O'Neall in J.B.D. DeBow ed., _Industrial Resources of the South and West_, II (New Orleans, 1852), 278.]

On the whole, the several sorts of doc.u.ments emanating from the Old South have a character of true depiction inversely proportioned to their abundance and accessibility. The statutes, copious and easily available, describe a hypothetical regime, not an actual one. The court records are on the one hand plentiful only for the higher tribunals, whither questions of human adjustments rarely penetrated, and on the other hand the decisions were themselves largely controlled by the statutes, perverse for ordinary practical purposes as these often were. It is therefore to the letters, journals and miscellaneous records of private persons dwelling in the regime and by their practices molding it more powerfully than legislatures and courts combined, that the main recourse for intimate knowledge must be had. Regrettably fugitive and fragmentary as these are, enough it may be hoped have been found and used herein to show the true nature of the living order.

The government of slaves was for the ninety and nine by men, and only for the hundredth by laws. There were injustice, oppression, brutality and heartburning in the regime,--but where in the struggling world are these absent? There were also gentleness, kind-hearted friends.h.i.+p and mutual loyalty to a degree hard for him to believe who regards the system with a theorist's eye and a partisan squint. For him on the other hand who has known the considerate and cordial, courteous and charming men and women, white and black, which that picturesque life in its best phases produced, it is impossible to agree that its basis and its operation were wholly evil, the law and the prophets to the contrary notwithstanding.