The social condition of the slaves cannot be fully understood without some reference to the revolting facts connected with plantation management. It is well to know what base and ingenious cruelties could be tolerated by public opinion, and endured by the slaves without exciting continual insurrections. Wonder at this sustained patience of the blacks passes into rage and indignation long before the student of this epoch reaches the eventual outbreaks of 1791: it seems as if a just instinct of manhood should have more promptly doomed these houses of iniquity, and handed them over to a midnight vengeance. And there results a kind of disappointment from the discovery, that, when the blacks finally began to burn and slaughter, they were not impelled by the desire of liberty or the recollection of great crimes, but were blind agents of a complicated situation. It is only in the remote historical sense that Slavery provoked Insurrection. The first great night of horror in San Domingo rose from circumstances that were not explicitly chargeable to the absence of freedom or to the outrages of the slaveholder. But if these things had not fuelled the lighted torches and whetted the blades when grasped, it would have been strange and monstrous indeed. Stranger still would it have been, if the flames of that first night had not kindled in the nobler breasts among that unchained multitude a determination never to endure plantation ferocity again. The legitimate cause for rebelling then took the helm and guided the rest of the story into dignity.
The frequency of enfranchisement might mislead us into expecting that the colonial system of slavery was tempered with humanity. It was rather like that monarchy which the wit described as being "tempered by assassination." The mulatto was by no means a proof that mercy and justice regulated the plantation life. His enfranchisement reacted cruelly upon the negro. It seemed as if the recognition of one domestic sentiment hurt the master's feelings; the damage to his organization broke out against the lower race in anger. The connections between black and white offered no protection to the former, nor amelioration of her lot. Indeed, the overseer, who desired always to be on good terms with the agent or the proprietor of a plantation, was more severe towards the unhappy object of his passion than to the other women, for fear of incurring reproach or suspicion. When he became the owner of slaves, his emancipating humor was no guaranty that they would receive a salutary and benignant treatment.