But take this same family and plant them in South Carolina or Virginia—how different the result! No common school opens its doors to their children; the only church, perhaps, is fifteen miles off, over a bad road. The whole atmosphere of the country in which they are born associates degradation and slavery with useful labor; and the only standard of gentility is ability to live without work. What branch of useful labor opens a way to its sons? Would he be a blacksmith?—The planters around him prefer to buy their blacksmiths in Virginia. Would he be a carpenter?—Each planter in his neighborhood owns one or two now. And so coopers and masons. Would he be a shoe-maker?—The plantation shoes are made in Lynn and Natick, towns of New England. In fact, between the free labor of the North and the slave labor of the South, there is nothing for a poor white to do. Without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the negroes, of "poor white trash," says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said. From this class spring a tribe of keepers of small groggeries, and dealers, by a kind of contraband trade, with the negroes, in the stolen produce of plantations. Thriving and promising sons may perhaps hope to grow up into negro-traders, and thence be exalted into overseers of plantations. The utmost stretch of ambition is to compass money enough, by any of a variety of nondescript measures, to "buy a nigger or two," and begin to appear like other folks. Woe betide the unfortunate negro man or woman, carefully raised in some good religious family, when an execution or the death of their proprietors throws them into the market, and they are bought by a master and mistress of this class! Oftentimes the slave is infinitely the superior, in every respect,—in person, manners, education and morals; but, for all that, the law guards the despotic authority of the owner quite as jealously.
From all that would appear, in the case of Souther, which we have recorded, he must have been one of this class. We have certain indications, in the evidence, that the two white witnesses, who spent the whole day in gaping, unresisting survey of his diabolical proceedings, were men of this order. It appears that the crime alleged against the poor victim was that of getting drunk and trading with these two very men, and that they were sent for probably by way of showing them "what a nigger would get by trading with them." This circumstance at once marks them out as belonging to that band of half-contraband traders who spring up among the mean whites, and occasion owners of slaves so much inconvenience by dealing with their hands. Can any words so forcibly show what sort of white men these are, as the idea of their standing in stupid, brutal curiosity, a whole day, as witnesses in such a hellish scene?
Conceive the misery of the slave who falls into the hands of such masters! A clergyman, now dead, communicated to the writer the following anecdote: In travelling in one of the Southern States, he put up for the night in a miserable log shanty, kept by a man of this class. All was dirt, discomfort and utter barbarism. The man, his wife, and their stock of wild, neglected children, drank whiskey, loafed and predominated over the miserable man and woman who did all the work and bore all the caprices of the whole establishment. He—the gentleman—was not long in discovering that these slaves were in person, language, and in every respect, superior to their owners; and all that he could get of comfort in this miserable abode was owing to their ministrations. Before he went away, they contrived to have a private interview, and begged him to buy them. They told him that they had been decently brought up in a respectable and refined family, and that their bondage was therefore the more inexpressibly galling. The poor creatures had waited on him with most assiduous care, tending his horse, brushing his boots, and anticipating all his wants, in the hope of inducing him to buy them. The clergyman said that he never so wished for money as when he saw the dejected visages with which they listened to his assurances that he was too poor to comply with their desires.
This miserable class of whites form, in all the Southern States, a material for the most horrible and ferocious of mobs. Utterly ignorant, and inconceivably brutal, they are like some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way.
Singular as it may appear, though slavery is the cause of the misery and degradation of this class, yet they are the most vehement and ferocious advocates of slavery.
The reason is this. They feel the scorn
