152 Cheerful View of Slavery (1841)

Returning home to this hospitable mansion in the dusk of the evening of the day following, I was surprised to see in a grove of trees near the courtyard of the farm, a large wood-fire blazing on the ground. Over the fire hung three cauldrons filled with hog’s lard and three old negro women in their usual drab-colored costume were leaning over the cauldrons and stirring the lard to clarify it. The red glare of the fire was reflected from their faces and I need hardly say how much they reminded me of the scene of the witches in Macbeth. Beside them, moving slowly backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair, sat the wife of the overseer muffled up in a cloak and suffering from a severe cold but obliged to watch the old slaves who are as thoughtless as children and might spoil the lard if she turned away her head for a few minutes. When I inquired the meaning of this ceremony, I was told it was “killing time”, this being the coldest season of the year. And that since I left the farm in the morning thirty hogs had been sacrificed by the side of a running stream not far off. These were destined to serve as winter provisions for the negroes, of whom there were about a hundred on this plantation. To supply all of them with food, clothes, and medical attendants, young, old, and impotent as well as the able-bodied, is but a portion of the expense of slave labor. They must be continually superintended by trustworthy whites who might often perform no small part of the task and far more effectively with their own hands.

I left Savannah in the middle of the night. The owner of the property kindly lent me his black servant as a guide and I found him provided with a passport, without which no slave can go out after dusk. The exact streets through which he was to pass in his way to me were prescribed and had he strayed from this route he might have been committed to the guard house. These and other precautionary regulations, equally irksome to the slaves and their masters, are said to have become necessary after an insurrection brought on by abolitionist missionaries who are spoken of here in precisely the same tone as incendiaries or beasts of prey whom it would be meritorious to shoot or hang. In this savage and determined spirit I heard some planters speak who were mild in their manners and evidently indulgent to their slaves. Nearly half the entire population of this state are of the colored race, who are said to be as excitable as they are ignorant. Many proprietors live with their wives and children quite isolated in the midst of the slaves, so that the danger of any popular movement is truly appalling.

The negroes so far as I have yet seen them, whether in domestic service or on the farms, appear very cheerful and free from care. Better fed than a large part of the laboring class of Europe and though meanly dressed and often in patched garments, never scantily clothed for the climate. We asked a woman in Georgia whether she was the slave of a family of our acquaintance. She replied merrily, “Yes, I belong to them and they belong to me.” She was in fact born and brought up on the estate.

As there were no inns in that part of South Carolina through which we passed in this short tour and as we were everywhere received hospitably by the planters, I had many opportunities of seeing their mode of life and the condition of the domestic and farm slaves. In some rich houses maize or Indian corn and rice were entirely substituted for wheaten bread. The usual style of living is that of English country gentlemen. They have well-appointed carriages and horses and well-trained black servants. The conversation of the gentlemen turned chiefly on agricultural subjects, shooting, and horse-racing. Several of the mansions were surrounded with deer-parks.

Arriving often at a late hour at our quarters in the evening, we heard the negroes singing loudly and joyously in chorus after their day’s work was over. On one estate about forty black children were brought up daily before the windows of the planter’s house and fed in sight of the family. Otherwise we were told the old women who have charge of them might in the absence of the parents, appropriate part of their allowance to themselves. All the slaves have some animal food daily. When they are ill they sometimes refuse to take medicine except from the hands of the master or mistress, and it is of all tasks the most delicate for the owners to decide when they are really sick and when only shamming from indolence.

After the accounts I had read of the sufferings of slaves, I was agreeably surprised to find them in general so remarkably cheerful and light-hearted. It is true that I saw no gangs working under over-seers on sugar-plantations. But out of two millions and a half of slaves in the United States, the larger proportion are engaged in such farming occupations and domestic services as I witnessed in Georgia and South Carolina. I was often for days together with negroes who served me as guides and found them as talkative and chatty as children, usually boasting of their master’s wealth and their own peculiar merits.

During our stay at Charleston, we were present at a negro wedding where the bride and bridegroom and nearly all the company were of unmixed African race. They were very merry. The bride and bridesmaids all dressed in white, the marriage service performed by an episcopal clergyman. Not long afterwards when staying at a farmhouse in North Carolina, I happened to ask a planter if one of his negroes with whom we had been conversing was married. He told me yes, he had a wife on that estate as well as another, her sister, on a different property which belonged to him; but that there was no legal validity in the marriage ceremony. I remarked that he must be mistaken, as an episcopal minister at Charleston would not have lent himself to the performance of a sacred rite if it were nugatory in practice and in the eye of the law. He replied that he himself was a lawyer by profession and that no legal validity ever had been or ought to be given to the marriage tie, so long as the right of sale could separate parent and child, husband and wife. Such separations he said could not always be prevented when slaves multiplied fast, though they were avoided by the masters as far as possible. He defended the custom of bringing up the children of the same estate in common, as it was far more humane not to cherish domestic ties among slaves.

Source: Charles Lyell, Travels in North America (1845), I, 157-184. https://archive.org/details/toldcontemporari03hartrich/page/590/mode/2up