host’s house, where the owner’s children, petted by a black nurse, played with the little black children or with some beloved old negro, he might see that pretty aspect of “our institution at the South,” which undoubtedly created in many young Southerners as they grew up a certain amount of genuine sentiment in favour of slavery.  Riding wider afield he might be struck, as General Sherman was, with the contentment of the negroes whom he met on the plantations.  On enquiry he would learn that the slave in old age was sure of food and shelter and free from work, and that as he approached old age his task was systematically diminished.  As to excessive toil at any time of life, he would perhaps conclude that it was no easy thing to drive a gang of Africans really hard.  He would be assured, quite incorrectly, that the slave’s food and comfort generally were greater than those of factory workers in the North, and, perhaps only too truly, that his privations were less than those of the English agricultural labourer at that time.  A wide and careful survey of the subject was made by Frederick Law Olmsted, a New York farmer, who wrote what but for their gloomy subject would be among the best books of travel.  He presents to us the picture of a prevailingly sullen, sapless, brutish life, but certainly not of acute misery or habitual oppression.  A Southerner old enough to remember slavery would probably not question the accuracy of his details, but would insist, very likely with truth, that there was more human happiness there than an investigator on such a quest would readily discover.  Even on large plantations in the extreme South, where the owner only lived part of the year, and most things had to be left to an almost always unsatisfactory overseer, the verdict of the observer was apt to be “not so bad as I expected.”

On the other hand, many of us know Longfellow’s grim poem of the Hunted Negro.  It is a true picture of the life led in the Dismal Swamps of Virginia by numbers of skulking fugitives, till the industry of negro-hunting, conducted with hounds of considerable value, ultimately made their lairs untenable.  The scenes in the auction room where, perhaps on the death or failure of their owner, husbands and wives, parents and children, were constantly being severed, and negresses were habitually puffed as brood mares; the gentleman who had lately sold his half-brother, to be sent far south, because he was impudent; the devilish cruelty with which almost the only recorded slave insurrection was stamped out; the chase and capture and return in fetters of slaves who had escaped north, or, it might be, of free negroes in their place; the advertisements for such runaways, which Dickens collected, and which described each by his scars or mutilations; the systematic slave breeding, for the supply of the cotton States, which had become a staple industry of the once glorious Virginia; the demand arising for the restoration of the African slave trade—­all