Excerpted Inspirations #167Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz KufsFeb 24, 20250 min readUpdated: Feb 24, 2025
![I am glad that missionaries go out to the dark corners of the earth; but I ask them not to overlook the dark corners at home. Talk to American slaveholders as you talk to savages in Africa. Tell them it is wrong to traffic in men. Tell them it is sinful to sell their own children, and atrocious to violate their own daughters. Tell them that all men are brethren, and that man has no right to shut out the light of knowledge from his brother. Tell them they are answerable to God for sealing up the Fountain of Life from souls that are thirsting for it.
[…] A clergyman who goes to the south, for the first time, has usually some feeling, however vague, that slavery is wrong. The slaveholder suspects this, and plays his game accordingly. He makes himself as agreeable as possible; talks on theology, and other kindred topics. The reverend gentleman is asked to invoke a blessing on a table loaded with luxuries. After dinner he walks round the premises, and sees the beautiful groves and flowering vines, and the comfortable huts of favored household slaves. The southerner invites him to talk with these slaves. He asks them if they want to be free, and they say, “O, no, massa.” This is sufficient to satisfy him. He goes home to publish a “South-Side View of Slavery,” and to complain of the exaggerations of abolitionists. He assures people that he has been to the south, and seen slavery for himself; that it is a beautiful “patriarchal institution;” that the slaves don’t want their freedom; that they have hallelujah meetings, and other religious privileges.
What does he know of the half-starved wretches toiling from dawn to dark on the plantations? Of mothers shrieking for their children, torn from their arms by slave-traders? Of young girls dragged down into moral filth? Of pools of blood around the whipping post? Of hounds trained to tear human flesh? Of men screwed into cotton gins to die? The slaveholder showed him none of these things, and the slaves dared not tell of them if he had asked them.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, first published 1861, edited by Lydia Maria Child](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6feacf_a43ec09168cc4afeaca19dbb99590b9c~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_2183,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/6feacf_a43ec09168cc4afeaca19dbb99590b9c~mv2.jpg)
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