[Footnote 19:  Captain L.V.  Cooley, Address Before the Tulane Society of Economics [New Orleans, 1911], p. 8.]

Some planters there were who inflicted severe punishments for disobedience and particularly for the offense of running away; and the community condoned and even sanctioned a certain degree of this.  Otherwise no planter would have printed such descriptions of scars and brands as were fairly common in the newspaper advertisements offering rewards for the recapture of absconders.[20] When severity went to an excess that was reckoned as positive cruelty, however, the law might be invoked if white witnesses could be had; or the white neighbors or the slaves themselves might apply extra-legal retribution.  The former were fain to be content with inflicting social ostracism or with expelling the offender from the district;[21] the latter sometimes went so far as to set fire to the oppressor’s house or to accomplish his death by poison, cudgel, knife or bullet.[22]

[Footnote 20:  Examples are reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 79-91.]

[Footnote 21:  An instance is given in H.M.  Henry, Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina (Emory, Va., [1914]), p. 75.]

[Footnote 22:  For instances see Plantation and Frontier, II, 117-121.]

In the typical group there was occasion for terrorism on neither side.  The master was ruled by a sense of dignity, duty and moderation, and the slaves by a moral code of their own.  This embraced a somewhat obsequious obedience, the avoidance of open indolence and vice, the attainment of moderate skill in industry, and the cultivation of the master’s good will and affection.  It winked at petty theft, loitering and other little laxities, while it stressed good manners and a fine faithfulness in major concerns.  While the majority were notoriously easy-going, very many made their master’s interests thoroughly their own; and many of the masters had perfect confidence in the loyalty of the bulk of their servitors.  When on the eve of secession Edmund Ruffin foretold[23] the fidelity which the slaves actually showed when the war ensued, he merely voiced the faith of the planter class.

[Footnote 23:  Debowfs Review, XXX, 118-120 (January, 1861).]

In general the relations on both sides were felt to be based on pleasurable responsibility.  The masters occasionally expressed this in their letters.  William Allason, for example, who after a long career as a merchant at Falmouth, Virginia, had retired to plantation life, declined his niece’s proposal in 1787 that he return to Scotland to spend his declining years.  In enumerating his reasons he concluded:  “And there is another thing which in your country you can have no trial of:  that is, of selling faithful slaves, which perhaps we have raised from their earliest breath.  Even this, however, some can do, as with horses, etc., but I must own that it is not in my disposition."[24]