[Footnote 42: F.L. Olmsted, _Journey in the Back Country_, p. 413.]
While the records have no parallel for Madame Lalaurie in her systematic
and wholesale torture of slaves, there were thousands of masters and
mistresses as tolerant and kindly as she was fiendish; and these were
virtually without restraint of public authority in their benevolent rule.
Lawmakers and magistrates by personal status in their own plantation
provinces, they ruled with a large degree of consent and cooperation by the
governed, for indeed no other course was feasible in the long run by men
and women of normal type. Concessions and friendly services beyond the
countenance and contemplation of the statutes were habitual with those
whose name was legion. The law, for example, conceded no property rights
to the slaves, and some statutes forbade specifically their possession
of horses, but the following characteristic letter of a South Carolina
mistress to an influential citizen tells an opposite story: "I hope you
will pardon the liberty I take in addressing you on the subject of John,
the slave of Professor Henry, Susy his wife, and the orphan children of my
faithful servant Pompey, the first husband of Susy.
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