266 AFRICAN TOM. [CHAP. XIX. 



iri use in the West Indies. It is a thong of leather, half an inch 

 wide and a quarter of an inch thick. No ordinary driver is 

 allowed to give more than six lashes for any offense, the head 

 driver twelve, and the overseer twenty-four. When an estate 

 is under superior management, the system is remarkably effective 

 in preventing crime. The most severe punishment required in 

 the last forty years, for a body of 500 negroes at Hopeton, was 

 for the theft of one negro from another. In that period there 

 has been no criminal act of the highest grade, for which a delin 

 quent could be committed to the penitentiary in Georgia, and 

 there have been only six cases of assault and battery. As a race, 

 the negroes are mild and forgiving, and by no means so prone to 

 indulge in drinking as the white man or the Indian. There 

 were more serious quarrels, and more broken heads, among the 

 Irish in a few years, when they came to dig the Brunswick 

 Canal, than had been known among the negroes in all the sur 

 rounding plantations for half a century. The murder of a hus 

 band by a black woman, whom he had beaten violently, is the 

 greatest crime remembered in this part of Georgia for a great 

 length of time. 



Under the white overseer, the principal charge here is given 

 to &quot; Old Tom,&quot; the head driver, a man of superior intelligence 

 and higher cast of feature. He was the son of a prince of the 

 Foulah tribe, and was taken prisoner, at the age of fourteen, near 

 Timbuctoo. The accounts he gave of what he remembered of 

 the plants and geography of Africa, have been taken down in 

 writing by Mr. Couper, and confirm many of the narratives of 

 modern travelers. He has remained a strict Mahometan, but his 

 numerous progeny of jet-black children and grandchildren, all of 

 them marked by countenances of a more European cast than 

 those of ordinary negroes, have exchanged the Koran for the Bible. 



During the last war, when Admiral Cockburn was off this 

 coast with his fleet, he made an offer of freedom to all the slaves 

 belonging to the father of my present host, and a safe convoy to 

 Canada. Nearly all would have gone, had not African Tom, to 

 whom they looked up with great respect, declined the proposal. 

 He told them he had first known what slavery was in the West 



