Slave Life in Georgia - African American History

Slave Life in Georgia 105
24.03.2006
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thoughts; shuts him out of the world up in a world of his own, where all is
darkness, and cruelty, and degradation, and where there is no hope to cheer him
on; reducing him, as the law says, to a "chattel," then the law unmakes God's
work; the slaveholder lends himself to it, and not all the reasonings or
arguments that can be strung together, on a text or on none, can make the thing
right. I have heard long preachments from ministers of the Gospel to try and
shew that slavery is not a wrong system; but somehow they could not fix it right
to my mind, and they always seemed to me to have a hard matter to bring it
square to their own. When I have been asked the question, I have had in my
mind the deathbed scenes I have witnessed of slaveholders, who all their lives
had rioted in cruelty to their slaves, but who, when the dark hour came, could
not leave the world without asking pardon of those they had ill-used.
There was my old master Thomas Stevens. Ever so many times before he really
did die, he thought his time was come. But though he made a mistake on all
these occasions, and recovered from his illnesses, in his frights he sent for us all
and asked us to forgive him. Many a time
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he would exclaim, that he wished "he'd never seen a nigger." I remember his
calling old Aunt Sally to him, and begging and praying of her to get the devil
away from behind the door, and such like. It is a common belief amongst us that
all the masters die in an awful fright, for it is usual for the slaves to be called up
on such occasions to say they forgive them for what they have done. So we
come to think their minds must be dreadfully uneasy about holding slaves, and
therefore there cannot be any good in it. All this may seem to be trifling, but it is
the truth. In our ignorance, we have no light but what comes to us through these
little chinks, and I only give what I have myself experienced.
Then, again, when the masters die, we cannot but feel that somebody is stronger
than they are. The masters always try to make us believe that they are superior
to us in every thing, and a different order of beings, almost next to God himself.
They do this to make us fear them. I will just relate an anecdote that may
illustrate this point.
My old master Stevens once missed a hen, and wanted to find out who had
stolen it. We were all called up and asked about it, but nobody knew any thing