Prev | Current Page 131 | Next

Adams, Nehemiah, 1806-1878

"The Sable Cloud A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861)"

' We can tell her; 'we have lived
at the South.' These white boys were sent on an errand with their cart,
and to increase its momentum down hill, and, withal, to tease and worry
a fellow-creature, with a skin not colored like their own, they made
this poor slave-boy get in. She should have seen the poor creature
trudging home, up hill, under a Southern sun, after the little white
tyrants had done with him, unless it was the case, which we more than
half suspect, that the ride was a stratagem to convey the poor child to
the auction-block. 'How the merry dogs,' the white boys, must have
laughed at this Northern lady's complacent looks at them. She had no
tears for the poor old white-headed negro, who, hearing the word
'school' from the lips of his white young masters, had such a rush of
sorrow come over his soul at the thought of the midnight ignorance in
which the slave-driver's whip had kept him, that he actually dropped his
burden in the public street, and uttered incautious words, for which, no
doubt, old as he was, he caught a terrible flogging. "Why, in the name
of humanity, did not the authoress load her pages, as she might so
easily have done, with scenes like that in the cars? There is slavery!
patent! undisguised! In the other cases it is slavery, indeed, but
covered with the pro-slavery lady's snow-white napkin.


Pages:
119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143