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1338 An American Dilemma
Statements in this paragraph are the conclusions the present author has reached after
having interviewed a great number of white and Negro lawyers in Northern cities.
E. Franklin Frazier, Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), pp. 34-35 and 169.
Hinton Rowan Helper, The Imfending Crisis of the South (i860; first edition,
i 857 )> P- ho.
“Notes on Virginia: 1781-1782,” in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, H. Am
Washington (editor) (1859), Vol. 8, pp. 403-404. In two paragraphs Cash, in his
Mind of the South, gives the common sense of the long-drawn-out discussion about
whether slavery was cruel or not:
“Wholly apart from the strict question of right and wrong, it is plain that slavery was
inescapably brutal and ugly. Granted the existence, in the higher levels, of genuine
humanity of feeling toward the bondsman; granted that, in the case of the house-
servants at least, there was sometimes real aflfection between master and man; granted
even that, at its best, the relationship here got to be gentler than it has ever been else-
where, the stark fact remains: It rested on force. The black man occupied the position
of a mere domestic animal, without will or right of his own. The lash lurked always In
the background. Its open crackle could often be heard where field hands were quartered.
Into the gentlest houses drifted now and then the sound of dragging chains and shackles,
the bay of hounds, the report of pistols on the trail of the runaway. And, as the adver-
tisements of the time incontestably prove, mutilation and the mark of the branding
iron were pretty common.
“Just as plain was the fact that the institution was brutalizing—to white men.
Virtually unlimited power acted inevitably to call up, in the coarser sort of master, that
sadism which lies concealed in the depths of universal human nature—^bred angry
impatience and a taste for cruelty for its own sake, with a strength that neither the
kindliness I have so often referred to (it continued frequently to exist unimpaired side
by side, and in the same man, with this other) nor notions of honor could eflfectually
restrain. And in the common whites it bred a savage and ignoble hate for the Negro,
which required only opportunity to break forth in relentless ferocity; for all their rage
against the ‘white-trash’ epithet concentrated itself on him rather than on the planters.”
(Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South [1941], pp. 82-83.)
^^John Codman Hurd, The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States
(1858-1862), Vol. I, pp. 222-309; Vol. 2, pp. 2-218.
See: William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice (1853) ;
John Codman Hurd, The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States (1858-
1862) ; and George M. Stroud, A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several
States of the United States of America (1856).
Compare William Sumner Jenkins, Pro^Slavery Thought in the Old South (l935)>
pp. 153-154-
’^Goodell, Of. cit,, pp. 122-127, 201-224; Stroud, of. cit., pp. 20-28, 67-75;
Hurd, Of. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 79-80 and 96.
For a summary of these insurrections and their effects on the whites, see Harvey
Wish, “American Slave Insurrections before 1861,” The Journal of Negro History
(July, 1937), pp. 299-320. See also Chapter 35, Section i, of this book.
Gilbert T. Stephenson, Race Distinctions in American Law (19x0), pp. 36 ff.
B. Schrieke, Alien Americans (1936), pp. 135-136.
Sec Frank Shay, Judge Lynch (1938)*
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