Saturday, the 13th.—Dear E——,— I rode to-day through all my woodpaths
for the last time with Jack, and I think I should have felt quite
melancholy at taking leave of them and him, but for the apparition of a
large black snake, which filled me with disgust and nipped my other
sentiments in the bud. Not a day passes now that I do not
encounter one or
more of these hateful reptiles; it is curious how much more odious they
are to me than the alligators that haunt the mud banks of the river round
the rice plantation. It is true that there is something very dreadful in
the thick shapeless mass, uniform in color almost to the black slime on
which it lies basking, and which you hardly detect till it begins to
move. But even those ungainly crocodiles never sickened me as those rapid,
lithe, and sinuous serpents do. Did I ever tell you that the people at the
rice plantation caught a young alligator and brought it to the house, and
it was kept for some time in a tub of water? It was an ill-tempered little
monster; it used to set up its back like a cat when it was angry, and open
its long jaws in a most vicious manner.
After looking at my new path in the pine land, I crossed Pike Bluff, and
breaking my way all through the burnt district, returned home by Jones’s.
In the afternoon, we paid a long visit to Mr. C——. It is extremely
interesting to me to talk with him about the negroes; he has spent so much
of his life among them, has managed them so humanely, and apparently so
successfully, that his experience is worthy of all attention. And yet it
seems to me that it is impossible, or rather, perhaps, for those very
reasons it is impossible, for him ever to contemplate them in any
condition but that of slavery. He thinks them very like the Irish, and
instanced their subserviency, their flattering, their lying, and
pilfering, as traits common to the character of both peoples. But I cannot
persuade myself that in both cases, and certainly in that of the negroes,
these qualities are not in great measure the result of their condition. He
says that he considers the extremely low diet of the negroes one reason
for the absence of crimes of a savage nature among them; most of them do
not touch meat the year round. But in this respect they certainly do not
resemble the Irish, who contrive
upon about as low a national diet as
civilisation is acquainted with, to commit the bloodiest and most frequent
outrages with which civilisation has to deal. His statement that it is
impossible to bribe the negroes to work on their own account with any
steadiness may be generally true, but admits of quite exceptions enough to
throw doubt upon its being natural supineness in the race rather than the
inevitable consequence of denying them the entire right to labor for
their own profit. Their laziness seems to me the necessary result of their
primary wants being supplied, and all progress denied them. Of course, if
the natural spur to exertion, necessity, is removed, you do away with the
will to work of a vast proportion of all who do work in the world. It is
the law of progress that a man’s necessities grow with his exertions to
satisfy them, and labor and improvement thus continually act and react
upon each other to raise the scale of desire and achievement; and I do not
believe that, in the majority of instances among any people on the face of
the earth, the will to labor for small indulgences would survive the loss
of freedom and the security of food enough to exist upon. Mr. —— said
that he had offered a bribe of twenty dollars apiece, and the use of a
pair of oxen, for the clearing of a certain piece of land, to the men on
his estate, and found the offer quite ineffectual to procure the desired
result; the land was subsequently cleared as usual task work under the
lash. Now, certainly, we have among Mr. ——’s people instances of men who
have made very considerable sums of money by boat-building in their
leisure hours, and the instances of almost life-long persevering stringent
labor by which slaves have at length purchased their own freedom and that
of their wives and children, are on record in numbers sufficient to prove
that they are capable of severe sustained effort of the most patient and
heroic kind for that great object,
liberty. For my own part, I know no
people who dote upon labor for its own sake; and it seems to me quite
natural to any absolutely ignorant and nearly brutish man, if you say to
him, ‘No effort of your own can make you free, but no absence of effort
shall starve you,’ to decline to work for anything less than mastery over
his whole life, and to take up with his mess of porridge as the
alternative. One thing that Mr. —— said seemed to me to prove rather too
much. He declared that his son, objecting to the folks on his plantation
going about bare-headed, had at one time offered a reward of a dollar to
those who should habitually wear hats without being able to induce them to
do so, which he attributed to sheer careless indolence; but I think it was
merely the force of the habit of going uncovered rather than absolute
laziness. The universal testimony of all present at this conversation was
in favor of the sweetness of temper and natural gentleness of
disposition of the negroes; but these characteristics they seemed to think
less inherent than the result of diet and the other lowering influences of
their condition; and it must not be forgotten that on the estate of this
wise and kind master a formidable conspiracy was organized among his
slaves.
We rowed home through a world of stars, the steadfast ones set in the still
blue sky, and the flashing swathes of phosphoric light turned up by our
oars and keel in the smooth blue water. It was lovely.
