Note 33 — Chapter V · SLAVERY IN ITS PROPERTY ASPECT—MORAL AND RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVES, ETC.

Twice it happened to come to my knowledge that sons of a planter, by whom I was lodged while on this journey—lads of fourteen or sixteen—who were supposed to have slept in the same room with me, really spent the night, till after daybreak, in the negro cabins. A southern merchant, visiting New York, to whom I expressed the view I had been led to form of the evil of slavery in this way, replied that he thought I over-estimated the evil to boys on the plantations, but that it was impossible to over-estimate it in towns. “I have personal knowledge,” he continued, “that there are but two lads, sixteen years old, in our town, [a small market town of Alabama,] who have not already had occasion to resort to remedies for the penalty of licentiousness.” “When on my brother’s plantation, just before I came North,” said another Southern merchant, on his annual visit to New York, “I was informed that each of his family-servants were suffering from ——, and I ascertained that each of my brother’s children, girls and boys, had been informed of it, and knew how and from whom it had been acquired. The negroes being their familiar companions, I tried to get my brother to send them North with me to school. I told him he might as well have them educated in a brothel at once, as in the way they were growing up.”