LETTER III
To General John H. Howard:—
I detailed to you, my brother, in my last letter, the happy retrospections that I so much love to indulge in of my father's judicious and benevolent management, as lord of the manor that had descended to him in a direct line from four, five, or six generations of his ancestors in South Carolina. Oh ! how contented, how divested of care, these poor ignorant slaves can be on these Southern plantations, if they have masters of good common sense, forethought, and philanthropy of character. And what can, and what does stimulate us to cultivate these characteristics of mind and heart so effectually, as the knowledge that we all possess from our childhood, that they are indispensably necessary to our conducting our plantations with success. How thankful I am to God, that the slave, who seems given up to the will of his master, should have the very strongest passion of that master's heart enlisted to protect him and provide for his every want. If a master by cruelty or oppression hurts his slave, he hurts himself in his pecuniary interests, he hurts himself in public opinion (that, in chivalrous South Carolina, regards a man a mean, cowardly wretch, who could be brutal or unkind to those who are utterly dependent on him), and he hurts himself in his conscience, which is educated to believe that the wrath of God will fall without mercy on the oppressor.
Let sickly Northern sentimentalists, then, expend all their surplus benevolence on the degraded, ignorant, starving, vicious foreigners that arrive by thousands daily in their midst; and when they have thus, by superhuman energy, reclaimed these their immediate neighbors from degradation, vice, and misery in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other Northern cities, they can start off on a mission to South Carolina, as apostles of this age of progress; and, after giving the planters due notice to quit the home of their fathers, on pain of being butchered by servile insurrection, we will humbly crave to be allowed to look on at a respectful distance, to see if their almightinesses can make a great and glorious nation of the slaves, that we ourselves have for two hundred years been compelled to watch over, to think for, to protect, to feed, and to clothe, with the unwearied interest of a father for his children.
The abolitionists, I mean those few who are sincere in their
