MISS KEMBLE'S GEORGIA.*

THERE is but one argument for slavery which is openly produced in England, and that is something like this ; slavery is, after all,

but a name ; in every country the labourer is subjected to the power of the capitalist, and the compulsion of hunger, if not more severe, is more regular and persistent than the compulsion of physical pain. For the rest, slavery as a form of labour has large compensations, the workman being saved from anxiety, from the dread of starvation, and from the terror of an old age of poverty and want. Except for the immutability of his condition, an incident accompanying free labour everywhere except in the United States and a small section of Europe, the slave is as well off as the unskilled white artisan.

We would recommend all to whom this line of argument seems effective to read a series of letters just published by Messrs. Longman. They were written in 1838, by Miss F. A. Kemble, then the English wife of a planter in Georgia, whose estate on the island of Darien is now occupied by the Federal troops, and were not originally intended for publication. The wife of a planter of strong Southern opinions, living on the profits of the system, and not moved apparently by any strong religious ideaq, Miss Kemble had singular opportunities for unprejudiced observation, and the result is a condemnation of slavery more severe than any in which professed philanthropists would venture to iudulge. It is a system based upon human misery and degradation, having no end save the owner's profit, no bulwark except incessant terror. Miss Kemble, it will be remembered, was on a well-managed plantation, held by merciful owners, where punishment, by a rule of the estate, was strictly limited, and where the head man was himself a grave, intelligent negro. On this property she found the negroes lodged in wretched huts, with one room twelve feet square and two little side cabins like those of a ship. Two families, sometimes eight or ten in number, lived in each, sleeping on mattresses of strewn forest moss, and covered with a " pestilential " blanket. Each house had a little garden, "usually untended and uncultivated," and the inmates and swarming children were all alike crusted with dirt, covered -with vermin, and stinking from the absence of any habit of bathing. The infirmary was a long building of two stories, crowded with women who lay under every extremity of suffering, wrapped in dirty blankets, on the bare floor, and shivering with the cold. It was the women to whom Mss Kemble chiefly attended ; among them the forms of suffering were manifold and terrible, for besides every kind of pain to which free labourers are liable, there is one peculiar to the slave women, and of which Miss Kemble's book is full till it is sickening to read. Slave-breeding pays well, and, as a consequence, the women, transferred to one " husband " after .another, and at the mercy of every overseer—headman Frank's wife was quietly taken away while the authoress was there, kept a year by the overseer, and then returned— perish of childbearing. The women are stimulated by the pride of being valuable to the estate, and wretched creatures worn out with labour still exultingly told their mistress that • Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. Hy F. A. Kemble. Long.

have nt, and three weeks after confinement driven back to work in cotton field. The consequence is an illness not often mentione out of a medical journal, pain in the back, and every conceivable form of uterine disease. The one petition of these poor women was for a longer period of rest, and they were flogged for peti- tioning, flogged, as a pretty young negress herself told the story :—

"She had not finished her task one day, when she said she felt ill, and unable to do so, and had been severely flogged by driver Bran, in whose gang she then was. The next day, in spite of this encouragement to labour, she had again been unable to complete her appointed work ; and Bran having told her that he'd tie her up and flog her if she did not get it done, she had left the field and run into the swamp. Tie you up, Louisa!' said I, what is that ?' She then described to me that they were fastened up by their wrists to a beam or a branch of a tree their feet barely touching the ground, so as to allow them no purchase for resistance or evasion of the lash, their clothes turned over their heads, and their backs scored with a leather thong, either by the driver himself, or if he pleases to inflict their punishment by deputy, any of the men he may choose to summon to the office ; it might be father, brother, husband, or lover, if the overseer so ordered it. I turned sick, and my blood curdled listening to these details from the slender young slip of a lassie, with her poor piteous face and murmuring pleading voice."

The rule is relentlessly enforced, the overseers pleading, what is probably the truth, that if any excuse were accepted there would be no end to the contrivances to obtain the much desired rest

"Among others, a poor woman called Mile, who could hardly stand for pain and swelling in her limbs ; she had had fifteen children and two miscarriages ; nine of her children had died ; for the last three years she had become almost a cripple with chronic rheumatism, yet she is driven every day to work in the field. She held my hands and stroked them in the most appealing way, while she exclaimed, Oh my miss's! my missis ! me neber sleep till day for de pain,' and with the day her labour must again be resumed. I gave her flannel and sal volatile to rub her poor swelled limbs with ; rest I could not give her—rest from her labour and pain—this mother of fifteen children."

This eternal labour was supported on two meals of hominy a day, one of them eaten after six hours of hungering labour, a practice, however, we are bound to add, which is not intended as an aggravation of cruelty. Though extremely injurious, it is almost universal among the free agriculturists of Bengal, the motive being economy. An early breakfast followed by hard labour "goes for nothing," and the ploughman, unless he eats after his first spell of toil, would be compelled to eat like an Englishman three times a day.

But it will be urged, in what does this state of affairs differ from that common among the proletariat of every country? In all there are classes who are overworked, whose wives are forced to field labour, who live in filth and misery, and who die early, worn out by toil and childbearing. That is true, though not to the same dreadful degree, the terror of the lash being extinct, for instance, in the two countries, Ireland and Belgium, in which there is the greatest amount of physical suffering. But the special aggravation in Georgia is that this condition is permanent, that there is a deliberate intention not to allow the slave to better herself, or, if possible, to obtain the intelligence to wish for a higher position. Miss Kemble found that the laws against teach- ing the slave to read were strictly enforced ; she was told by her own overseer that her mere presence among the slaves was full of danger to the institution ; her husband forbade her to present petitions, and she was finally compelled to leave the South utterly unable to endure the sense of her own powerlessness. And this is an inevitable incident of slavery, and prohibits even the influ- ence of voluntary benevolence from above. Suppose, for example, a slaveowner, full of intelligence and courage, chose to

rely on the military force which is always in practice behind him, and treat his slaves as the Roman patrician did, i.e., retain his despotic power, but cultivate every man to the limit of his ability, making one a scholar like 2Esop, another a physician such as St. Luke probably was, a third an armed athlete, such as

every slave gladiator must have been. The system under the pressure of modern ideas would collapse in a twelvemonth, and the planters, well aware of the fact, intercept the danger at the beginning by making intelligence a crime. The slave can never improve, for he can never learn. Thrift is valueless, for he can hold no property. Carefulness is waste of thought, for losses are not his. Industry is hateful, for why do more than is neces- sary to avoid the lash ? Even native brain-power is dangerous, for the able are always an irritation to absolute masters, who require, as the Emperor Francis said, obedient subjects, not pro- fessors. Moreover, the most wretched peasant in Belgium. they would yield "plenty of little figs for massa." The frequently ten or eleven children, are flogged when preg whose e passes in toil for bare subsistence, whose wife helps to

dra;eI st, , e plough, and whose children begin ditching at ten, has,

at some alleviations. He can have a home, sympathy from his wife, love from his children, excitement from village gossip, consolation from the assured hope that his condition in the next world will compensate hint for his sufferings in this. How does it stand with the slave ?

She was the wife of headman Frank, the most intelligent and trust- worthy of Mr. —'s slaves ; the head driver—second in command to the overseer, and, indeed, second to none during the pestilential season, when the rice swamps cannot with impunity be inhabited by any white man, and when, therefore, the whole force employed in its cultivation on the island remains entirely under his authority and control. His wife—a tidy, trim, intelligent woman, with a pretty figure, but a de- cidedly negro face—was taken from him by the overseer left in charge of the plantation by the Messrs. —, the all-efficient and all-satisfac- tory Mr. K—, and she had a son by him, whose straight features and diluted colour, no less than his troublesome, discontented, and insub- missive disposition, bear witness to his Yankee descent. I do not know how long Mr. K—'s occupation of Frank's wife continued, or how the latter endured the wrong done to him. When I visited the island, Betty was again living with her husband—a grave, sad, thoughtful-looking man, whose admirable moral and mental qualities were extolled to me by no worse a judge of such matters than Mr. K— himself, during the few days he spent with Mr. —, while we were on the plantation. This outrage upon this man's rights was perfectly notorious among all the slaves."

The same overseer, the instant there was any dispute between husband and wife, used to separate and remarry them to other slaves, celibacy for any period being unprofitable to the owner. The children die horribly fast, faster even than among the out- casts of London ; and as for religion, the most successful over- seers are utterly opposed to any mode of religious teaching. On this plantation a slave was allowed to preach ; but the creed which teaches that all men are brothers is a dangerous one for a slave plantation. To make the system consistent the planters should be Mahommedans, but then every slave who turned Mahommedan would be free, every woman who had borne a child to her owner, every child of a white man, and every slave endangered by violence in life or limb, and so the plantation would be depopulated. As a rule, according to our authoress, the negro is brutishly ignorant, the women unable even to tell their children's ages ; the men unable to do anything, except the work to which they are flogged. The "system," wholly apart from its merits or demerits on moral grounds, establishes bar- barism as the condition of the labouring class, and consequently cripples society at its base.

We have one more extract to make—a testimony to the con- dition of the mean whites on the pine lands, the class whose existence is so stoutly denied by men familiar only with Mary- land and Virginia.

"I speak now of the scattered white population, who, too poor to possess land or slaves, and, having no means of living in towns, squat (most appropriately is it so termed) either on other men's land or Government districts—always here swamp or pine barren—and claim masterdom over the place they invade, till ejected by the rightful pro- prietors. These wretched creatures will not, for they are whites (and labour belongs to blacks and slaves alone here), labour for their own subsistence. They are hardly protected from the weather by the rude shelters they frame for themselves in the midst of these dreary woods. Their food is chiefly supplied by shooting the wild fowl and venison, and stealing from the cultivated patches of the plantations nearest at hand. Their clothes hang about them in filthy tatters, and the com- bined squalor and fierceness of their appearance are really frightful." "These are the so-called pine-landors of Georgia, I suppose the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth,—filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one of the nobler attributes which have been found occasionally allied to the vices of savage nature. They own no slaves, for they aro almost without exception abjectly poor ; they will not work, for that, as they conceive, would reduce them to an equality with the abhorred negroes ; they squat, and steal, and starve, on the outskirts of this lowest of all civilized societies, and their coun- tenances bear witness to the squalor of their condition and the utter degradation of their natures. To the crime of slavery, though they have no profitable part or lot in it, they are fiercely accessory, because it is the barrier that divides the black and white races, at the foot of which they lie wallowing in unspeakable degradation, but immensely proud of the base freedom which still separates them from the lash-driven tillers of the soil."