Theoretically the master might be expected perhaps to expend the minimum
possible to keep his slaves in strength, to discard the weaklings and the
aged, to drive his gang early and late, to scourge the laggards hourly, to
secure the whole with fetters by day and with bolts by night, and to keep
them in perpetual terror of his wrath. But Olmsted, who seems to have gone
South with the thought of finding some such theory in application, wrote:
"I saw much more of what I had not anticipated and less of what I had in
the slave states than, with a somewhat extended travelling experience, in
any other country I ever visited";[5] and Nehemiah Adams, who went from
Boston to Georgia prepared to weep with the slaves who wept, found himself
laughing with the laughing ones instead.[6]
[Footnote 5: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 179.]
[Footnote 6: Nehemiah Adams. _A Southside View of Slavery, or Three Months
in the South in 1854_ (Boston, 1854), chap. 2.]
The theory of rigid coercion and complete exploitation was as strange to
the bulk of the planters as the doctrine and practice of moderation was to
those who viewed the regime from afar and with the mind's eye.
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