Up through this American feudalism the Negro began to rise.  He learned in the eighteenth century the English language, he began to be identified with the Christian church, he mingled his blood to a considerable extent with the master class.  The house servants particularly were favored, in some cases receiving education, and the number of free Negroes gradually increased.

Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of Southern slavery.  One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridled power and wide oppression of men.  Which is the true picture?  The answer is simple:  both are true.  They are not opposite sides of the same shield; they are different shields.  They are pictures, on the one hand, of house service in the great country seats and in the towns, and on the other hand of the field laborers who raised the great tobacco, rice, and cotton crops.  We have thus not only carelessly mixed pictures of what were really different kinds of slavery, but of that which represented different degrees in the development of the economic system.  House service was the older feudal idea of personal retainership, developed in Virginia and Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  It had all the advantages and disadvantages of such a system; the advantage of the strong personal tie and disadvantage of unyielding caste distinctions, with the resultant immoralities.  At its worst, however, it was a matter primarily of human relationships.

Out of this older type of slavery in the northern South there developed, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the southern South the type of slavery which corresponds to the modern factory system in its worst conceivable form.  It represented production of a staple product on a large scale; between the owner and laborer were interposed the overseer and the drivers.  The slaves were whipped and driven to a mechanical task system.  Wide territory was needed, so that at last absentee landlordship was common.  It was this latter type of slavery that marked the cotton kingdom, and the extension of the area of this system southward and westward marked the aggressive world-conquering visions of the slave barons.  On the other hand it was the milder and far different Virginia house service and the personal retainership of town life in which most white children grew up; it was this that impressed their imaginations and which they have so vividly portrayed.  The Negroes, however, knew the other side, for it was under the harsher, heartless driving of the fields that fully nine-tenths of them lived.