THE TRANSPLANTATION OF A RACE. 521 



and even where the farm employed no more hands than could be 

 gathered in a house " quarter," the people were commonly subject 

 to an anxious scrutiny as regarded their moral and religious train- 

 ing. Here and there, especially when there were young white men 

 about, the result was the deplorable mixture of the races. There 

 is no question but that this was extensive, though the amount of 

 it is exaggerated. Yet it was common enough to degrade the 

 whites and to make of itself a sufficient reason for ending the insti- 

 tution, however profitable it might otherwise have been. Men of 

 no race are safely to be trusted with such power. The social evil 

 was the heaviest part of the load which the high-minded slave 

 owners had to bear. It was shared in even larger measure by his 

 wife and daughters. How heavy the cross was can only be known 

 to those who remember the conditions of that unhappy time. 



The result of the hopeless effort to keep the slaves in decent 

 ways and to prevent the pollution of their sons was to make nearly 

 every right-minded slaveholder at heart an abolitionist. Although 

 the men, and even the women, who suffered most would have been 

 disposed to slay any one who suggested that they shared the opin- 

 ions of the detested antislavery folk, nearly every one in his heart 

 reprobated the institution and in his mind was revolving some 

 scheme, generally fanciful, by which an end of it might be made. 

 They were in the unhappy position where overwhelming self-inter- 

 est fought with their moral sense. Now and then some one of 

 them passed the critical point and entered into the fold of the 

 accursed abolitionists; but others, after the manner of average 

 men, paltered with the situation, waiting for fate to decide the 

 matter. In the meantime, they strove as best they could to lift 

 these people to a higher estate. 



In many ways the standard of care by which the conduct of a 

 master in relation to his slaves was judged was high. He was ex- 

 pected to clothe them in a fit manner, keep them from the nocturnal 

 wanderings, termed " running," so common a trait in these children 

 of the tropics, to see that they were decently married, that they 

 went to church in a dutiful way, and, above all, that they were 

 not abused by other whites, particularly by other slaveholders. 

 To strike or even to vilify the slaves of another was a very serious 

 thing. The offended person knew well that it was his part to 

 make his complaint to the servant's master. Where the negroes 

 exceeded in number those needed for household and personal serv- 

 ice — there were often a dozen or two thus employed in families 

 of no great wealth — there was a division between the house people 

 and the " hands." Those in the forftier group were selected folk, 

 often belonging to families that had been associated ^\^th those of 



VOL. LVI. — 41 



