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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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“In those days, this matter of slavery had never been canvassed as it has now; nobody dreamed of any harm in it. “My father was a born aristocrat. I think, in some pre-existent state, he must have been in the higher circles of spirits, and brought all his old court pride along with him; for it was ingrain, bred in the bone, though he was originally of poor and not in any way of noble family. My brother was begotten in his image. “Now, an aristocrat, you know, the world over, has no human sympathies, be- yond a certain line in society. In England the line is in one place, in Burmah in an- other, and in America in another; but the aristocrat of all these countries never goes over it. What would be hardship and distress and injustice in his own class, is a cool matter of course in another one. My father’s dividing line was that of color. Among his equals, never was a man more just and generous; but he consid- ered the negro, through all possible gradations of color, as an intermediate link be- tween man and animals, and graded all his ideas of justice or generosity on this hypothesis. I suppose, to be sure, if anybody had asked him, plump and fair, whether they had human, immortal souls, he might have hemmed and hawed, and said yes. But my father was not a man much troubled with spiritualism; religious sentiment he had none, beyond a veneration for God, as decidedly the head of the upper classes. “Well, my father worked some five hundred negroes; he was an inflexible, driving, punctilious business man; everything was to move by system,- to be sus- tained with unfailing accuracy and precision. Now, if you take into account that |
