With
a bright sun overhead, and a sufficiency of sustenance for the day
before him, money will not tempt Sambo to toil among cotton or canes,
should the spirit move him to lie under his own vine or fig-tree; and he
is unfortunately peculiarly liable to these lazy fits just when his
services are most vitally important to the interests of his employer.
From so much ground having been thrown out of cultivation in the West
Indies, the supply of free negro labor is perhaps now nearly equal to
the ordinary demand; but we all know how, in the early times of
emancipation, the fortunes of our planters fared. There has been, in all
ages, certain cases of apparent political necessity, hardly to be
justified--sometimes hardly to be defended--on purely moral grounds.
Whether the existence and maintenance of a slave population in the South
be one of these huge dilemmas or paradoxes is a question that any
English or Northern abolitionist is about as capable of determining, as
he would be of legislating for Mangolian Tartary.
The two blackest points in all the dark system--for dark it is, looking
at it how you will--are first, the complication of sin and shame arising
from the mixture of the races; and, secondly, the separation of husband
and wife from each other, and from their infant families, by sale.
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