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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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all this was to be worked out by a set of lazy, twaddling, shiftless laborers, who had grown up, all their lives, in the absence of every possible motive to learn how to do anything but ‘shirk,’ as you Vermonters say, and you’ll see that there might naturally be, on his plantation, a great many things that looked horrible and dis- tressing to a sensitive child like me. “Besides all, he had an overseer,- a great, tall, slab-sided, two-fisted renegade son of Vermont-(begging your pardon),- who had gone through a regular appren- ticeship in hardness and brutality, and taken his degree to be admitted to practice. My mother never could endure him, nor I; but he obtained an entire ascendency over my father; and this man was the absolute despot of the estate. “I was a little fellow then, but I had the same love that I have now for all kinds of human things,- a kind of passion for the study of humanity, come in what shape it would. I was found in the cabins and among the field-hands a great deal, and, of course, was a great favorite; and all sorts of complaints and grievances were breathed in my ear; and I told them to mother, and we, between us, formed a sort of committee for a redress of grievances. We hindered and repressed a great deal of cruelty, and congratulated ourselves in doing a vast deal of good, till, as often happens, my zeal overacted. Stubbs complained to my father that he couldn’t manage the hands, and must resign his position. Father was a fond, indulgent husband, but a man that never flinched from anything that he thought necessary; and so he put down his foot, like a rock, between us and the field-hands. He told my mother, in language perfectly respect- |
