[Footnote 17:  A. de Puy Van Buren, Jottings of a Year’s Sojourn in the South, pp. 232-236.]

A key to Van Buren’s enthusiasm is given by a passage in the diary of the great English reporter, William H. Russell:  “The more one sees of a planter’s life the greater is the conviction that its charms come from a particular turn of mind, which is separated by a wide interval from modern ideas in Europe.  The planter is a denomadized Arab;—­he has fixed himself with horses and slaves in a fertile spot, where he guards his women with Oriental care, exercises patriarchal sway, and is at once fierce, tender and hospitable.  The inner life of his household is exceedingly charming, because one is astonished to find the graces and accomplishments of womanhood displayed in a scene which has a certain sort of savage rudeness about it after all, and where all kinds of incongruous accidents are visible in the service of the table, in the furniture of the house, in its decorations, menials, and surrounding scenery."[18] The Southerners themselves took its incongruities much as a matter of course.  The regime was to their minds so clearly the best attainable under the circumstances that its roughnesses chafed little.  The plantations were homes to which, as they were fond of singing, their hearts turned ever; and the negroes, exasperating as they often were to visiting strangers, were an element in the home itself.  The problem of accommodation, which was the central problem of the life, was on the whole happily solved.

[Footnote 18:  William H. Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), p. 285.]

The separate integration of the slaves was no more than rudimentary.  They were always within the social mind and conscience of the whites, as the whites in turn were within the mind and conscience of the blacks.  The adjustments and readjustments were mutually made, for although the masters had by far the major power of control, the slaves themselves were by no means devoid of influence.  A sagacious employer has well said, after long experience, “a negro understands a white man better than the white man understands the negro."[19] This knowledge gave a power all its own.  The general regime was in fact shaped by mutual requirements, concessions and understandings, producing reciprocal codes of conventional morality.  Masters of the standard type promoted Christianity and the customs of marriage and parental care, and they instructed as much by example as by precept; they gave occasional holidays, rewards and indulgences, and permitted as large a degree of liberty as they thought the slaves could be trusted not to abuse; they refrained from selling slaves except under the stress of circumstances; they avoided cruel, vindictive and captious punishments, and endeavored to inspire effort through affection rather than through fear; and they were content with achieving quite moderate industrial results.  In short their despotism, so far as it might properly be so called was benevolent in intent and on the whole beneficial in effect.