With that ... slavery becomes a
family relation, next in its attachments to that of parent and child."[46]
[Footnote 44: Letter of E.N. Thompson, Vineville, Ga. (a suburb of Macon),
to J.B. Lamar at Macon, Ga., Aug. 7, 1854. MS. in the possession of Mrs.
A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]
[Footnote 45: Letter of Henry Jackson, Jan. 11, 1837, to Howell Cobb. MS.
in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]
[Footnote 46: J.B. O'Neall in J.B.D. DeBow ed., _Industrial Resources of
the South and West_, II (New Orleans, 1852), 278.]
On the whole, the several sorts of documents emanating from the Old
South have a character of true depiction inversely proportioned to their
abundance and accessibility. The statutes, copious and easily available,
describe a hypothetical regime, not an actual one. The court records are on
the one hand plentiful only for the higher tribunals, whither questions of
human adjustments rarely penetrated, and on the other hand the decisions
were themselves largely controlled by the statutes, perverse for ordinary
practical purposes as these often were. It is therefore to the letters,
journals and miscellaneous records of private persons dwelling in the
regime and by their practices molding it more powerfully than legislatures
and courts combined, that the main recourse for intimate knowledge must be
had.
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