The slaveholder’s sons are, of course, vitiated, even while boys, by the unclean influences every where around them.  Nor do the master’s daughters always escape.  Severe retributions sometimes come upon him for the wrongs he does to the daughters of the slaves.  The white daughters early hear their parents quarrelling about some female slave.  Their curiosity is excited, and they soon learn the cause.  They are attended by the young slave girls whom their father has corrupted; and they hear such talk as should never meet youthful ears, or any other ears.  They know that the woman slaves are subject to their father’s authority in all things; and in some cases they exercise the same authority over the men slaves.  I have myself seen the master of such a household whose head was bowed down in shame; for it was known in the neighborhood that his daughter had selected one of the meanest slaves on his plantation to be the father of his first grandchild.  She did not make her advances to her equals, nor even to her father’s more intelligent servants.  She selected the most brutalized, over whom her authority could be exercised with less fear of exposure.  Her father, half frantic with rage, sought to revenge himself on the offending black man; but his daughter, foreseeing the storm that would arise, had given him free papers, and sent him out of the state.

In such cases the infant is smothered, or sent where it is never seen by any who know its history.  But if the white parent is the father, instead of the mother, the offspring are unblushingly reared for the market.  If they are girls, I have indicated plainly enough what will be their inevitable destiny.

You may believe what I say; for I write only that whereof I know.  I was twenty-one years in that cage of obscene birds.  I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks.  It makes white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched.  And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.

Yet few slaveholders seem to be aware of the widespread moral ruin occasioned by this wicked system.  Their talk is of blighted cotton crops—­not of the blight on their children’s souls.

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader.  Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.

X. A Perilous Passage In The Slave Girl’s Life.