Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839

• Author(s): Fanny Kemble,
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Pages: 354
• ISBN_10: 1548771260
  ISBN_13: 9781548771263
  
• Language: en
• Categories: History / United States / General , History / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV) , Social Science / Customs & Traditions , Social Science / Black Studies (Global) ,

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"The most outspoken, damning record against slavery that we have read for many years past. The book should be read by everyone who believes in Southern chivalry." -Reader

"There is but one argument for slavery which is openly produced in England, and that is something like this; slavery is, after all, but a name; in every country the laborer is subjected to the power of the capitalist, and the compulsion of hunger, if not more severe, is more regular and persistent than the compulsion of physical pain. For the rest, slavery as a form of labor has large compensations, the workman being saved from anxiety, from the dread of starvation, and from the terror of an old age of poverty and want. Except for the immutability of his condition, an incident accompanying free labor everywhere except in the United States and a small section of Europe, the slave is as well off as the unskilled white artisan....We would recommend all to whom this line of argument seems effective to read a series of letters...written in 1848, by Miss F. A. Kemble, then the English wife of a planter in Georgia....Not moved apparently by any strong religious ideas, Miss Kemble had singular opportunities for unprejudiced observation, and the result is a condemnation of slavery more severe than any in which professed philanthropists would venture to indulge. It is a system based upon human misery and degradation, having no end save the owner's profit, no bulwark except incessant terror. Miss Kemble, it will be remembered, was on a well-managed plantation, held by merciful owners, where punishment, by a rule of the estate, was strictly limited, and where the head man was himself a grave, intelligent Negro. On this property she found the Negroes lodged in wretched huts, with one room twelve feet square and two little side cabins like those of a ship. Two families, sometimes eight or ten in number, lived in each, sleeping on mattresses of strewn forest moss, and covered with a 'pestilential' blanket....It was the women to whom Miss Kemble chiefly attended; among them the forms of suffering were manifold and terrible, for besides every kind of pain to which free laborers are liable, there is one peculiar to the slave women, and of which Miss Kemble's book is full till it is sickening to read. Slave-breeding pays well, and, as a consequence, the women, transferred to one 'husband' after another, and at the mercy of every overseer - headman Frank's wife was quietly taken away while the authoress was there, kept a year by the overseer, and then returned - perish of childbearing. The women are stimulated by the pride of being valuable to the estate, and wretched creatures worn out with labor still exultingly told their mistress that they would yield 'plenty of little nigs for massa.' They have frequently ten or eleven children, are flogged when pregnant, and three weeks after confinement driven back to work in the cotton field. The consequence is an illness not often mentioned out of a medical journal, pain in the back, and every conceivable form of uterine disease. The one petition of these poor women was for a longer period of rest, and they were flogged for petitioning, flogged....Miss Kemble found that the laws against teaching slaves to read were strictly enforced; she was told by her own overseer that her mere presence among the slaves was full of danger to the institution; her husband forbade her to present petitions, and she was finally compelled to leave the South utterly unable to endure the sense of her own powerlessness. And this is an inevitable incident of slavery, and prohibits even the influence of voluntary benevolence from above." -The Living Age