Negroes are a religious as well as a superstitious race.  At midnight Saturday it was their custom to ring the great plantation bell, and spend the next several hours in exhorting, praying and singing their curious, doleful hymns.  The whites gave them instruction and training along these lines.  Heart and conscious were alike cultivated—­not alone the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.  Statistics show that there were 466,000 slaves belonging to churches in the South:  Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and other sects.  So the owners of these christianized people thought that they were doing missionary work in saving them from the cannibalism of heathen Africa.  Both men and women were taught trades and useful occupations.  There were tanners, shoemakers, blacksmiths, farmers, gardeners, horticulturists and carpenters among the men.  The women could sew, cook, card, spin, weave, knit, wash, iron, in fact what they produced in this way would put to shame the acquirements and accomplishments of free labor.  Many of the older negroes refused to be freed, when the mighty proclamation came.  They would not withdraw from the protection of “Old Marster.”  Look at the product of these two generations of freedom.  What is he?  Well we know the painful answer.

But while the buying of slaves for domestic, or field service, was legitimate, the man who pursued the traffic as a business, and purchased merely to sell again, was despised.  He was termed a “nigger-buyer,” and was a pariah in the lowest sense of ostracism.  It was claimed that there was a distinction with a very great difference.  Three or four servants for ordinary household duties were deemed sufficient.  On a farm more hands were needed, and the plantations further south required several hundred.  The refractory slave of Kentucky and the border states, was sold “down the river” in commercial parlance, where the discipline of the rice, sugar, and cotton plantations kept in check his evil inclinations.  There might have been cases of cruel punishment, but the rule was kindness—­if for no other reason, the master would not injure that which stood for money, for property.  The expense of keeping slaves was enormous.  Where is the laborer of to-day who is furnished his house, clothing, doctors, medicine, and not a little pocket money on occasions?

The South employed her laborers to produce the great staple of cotton, which was to clothe mankind.  They were properly clothed, fed and made comfortable.  In addition, they were cared for when sick, and there existed the warmest affection for the majority of them.  The world can nowhere show human beings as care-free in bondage as were the negroes of the ante-bellum days.  Judge the Southern owner by the rule and not the exception.  As well judge a town by its halt, maimed, blind, diseased and lawless citizens, as the slave owners by occasional acts of oppression to be found on the plantations.  But it was the “Down east” Yankee overseer who was cruel—­not