In looking about me, I found that many of these charges against the negro were true.  The black man was deceptive, and he was often dishonest.  There can be no effect without a cause, and the reasons for this deception and dishonesty were apparent, without difficult research.  The system of slavery necessitated a constant struggle between the slave and his overseer.  It was the duty of the latter to obtain the greatest amount of labor from the sinews of the slave.  It was the business of the slave to perform as little labor as possible.  It made no difference to him whether the plantation produced a hundred or a thousand bales.  He received nothing beyond his subsistence and clothing.  His labor had no compensation, and his balance-sheet at the end of the month or year was the same, whether he had been idle or industrious.  It was plainly to his personal interest to do nothing he could in any way avoid.  The negro displayed his sagacity by deceiving the overseer whenever he could do so.  The best white man in the world would have shunned all labor under such circumstances.  The negro evinced a pardonable weakness in pretending to be ill whenever he could hope to make the pretense successful.

Receiving no compensation for his services, beyond his necessary support, the negro occasionally sought to compensate himself.  He was fond of roasted pork, but that article did not appear on the list of plantation rations.  Consequently some of the negroes would make clandestine seizure of the fattest pigs when the chance of detection was not too great.  It was hard to convince them that the use of one piece of property for the benefit of another piece, belonging to the same person, was a serious offense.

“You see, Mr. K——­,” said a negro to me, admitting that he had sometimes stolen his master’s hogs, “you see, master owns his saddle-horse, and he owns lots of corn.  Master would be very mad if I didn’t give the horse all the corn he wanted.  Now, he owns me, and he owns a great many hogs.  I like hog, just as much as the horse likes corn, but when master catches me killing the hogs he is very mad, and he makes the overseer whip me.”

Corn, chickens, flour, meal, in fact, every thing edible, became legitimate plunder for the negroes when the rations furnished them were scanty.  I believe that in nine cases out of ten the petty thefts which the negroes committed were designed to supply personal wants, rather than for any other purpose.  What the negro stole was usually an article of food, and it was nearly always stolen from the plantation where he belonged.

Sometimes there was a specially bad negro—­one who had been caught in some extraordinary dishonesty.  One in my employ was reported to have been shot at while stealing from a dwelling-house several years before.  Among two hundred negroes, he was the only noted rascal.  I did not attribute his dishonesty to his complexion alone.  I have known worse men than he, in whose veins there was not a drop of African blood.  The police records everywhere show that wickedness of heart “dwells in white and black the same.”