"It is clear," I replied, "_he_ could not bear freedom, but that does not prove he might not have 'endured' it if he had never been a slave. His overjoy at obtaining liberty, after so long a struggle for it, led to his excesses and his ruin. According to your view, neither the black nor the poor white is competent to take care of himself. The Almighty, therefore, has laid upon _you_ a triple burden; you not only have to provide for yourself and your children, but for two races beneath you, the black and the clay-eater. The poor nigger has a hard time, but it seems to me you have a harder one."
"Well, it's a fact, we do. I often think that if it wasn't for the color and the odor, I'd willingly exchange places with my man Jim."
The Colonel made this last remark in a half-serious, half-comic way, that excited my risibilities, but before I could reply, the carriage stopped, and Jim, opening the door, announced:
"We's har, massa, and de prayin' am gwine on."
[Footnote I: The foregoing statistics are correct. That small number of slave-holders sustains the system of slavery, and has caused this terrible rebellion. They are, almost to a man, rebels and secessionists, and we may cover the South with armies, and keep a file of soldiers upon every plantation, and not smother this insurrection, unless we break down the power of that class. Their wealth gives them their power, and their wealth is in their slaves. Free their negroes by an act of emancipation, or confiscation, and the rebellion will crumble to pieces in a day. Omit to do it, and it will last till doomsday.
The power of this dominant class once broken, with landed property at the South more equally divided, a new order of things will arise there. Where now, with their large plantations, not one acre in ten is tilled, a system of small farms will spring into existence, and the whole country be covered with cultivation. The six hundred thousand men who have gone there to fight our battles, will see the amazing fertility of the Southern soil--into which the seed is thrown and springs up without labor into a bountiful harvest--and many of them, if slavery is crushed out, will remain there. Thus a new element will be introduced into the South, an element that will speedily make it a loyal, prosperous, and _intelligent_ section of the Union.