“Well, Mas’r,” said Tom, “towards
morning something brushed by me, and I kinder half
woke; and then I hearn a great splash, and then I clare
woke up, and the gal was gone. That’s all
I know on ’t.”
The trader was not shocked nor amazed; because, as
we said before, he was used to a great many things
that you are not used to. Even the awful presence
of Death struck no solemn chill upon him. He had
seen Death many times,—met him in the way
of trade, and got acquainted with him,—and
he only thought of him as a hard customer, that embarrassed
his property operations very unfairly; and so he only
swore that the gal was a baggage, and that he was
devilish unlucky, and that, if things went on in this
way, he should not make a cent on the trip. In
short, he seemed to consider himself an ill-used man,
decidedly; but there was no help for it, as the woman
had escaped into a state which never will give
up a fugitive,—not even at the demand of
the whole glorious Union. The trader, therefore,
sat discontentedly down, with his little account-book,
and put down the missing body and soul under the head
of losses!
“He’s a shocking creature, isn’t
he,—this trader? so unfeeling! It’s
dreadful, really!”
“O, but nobody thinks anything of these traders!
They are universally despised,—never received
into any decent society.”
But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to
blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent
man, who supports the system of which the trader is
the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself?
You make the public statement that calls for his trade,
that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no
shame in it; and in what are you better than he?
Are you educated and he ignorant, you high and he
low, you refined and he coarse, you talented and he
simple?
In the day of a future judgment, these very considerations
may make it more tolerable for him than for you.
In concluding these little incidents of lawful trade,
we must beg the world not to think that American legislators
are entirely destitute of humanity, as might, perhaps,
be unfairly inferred from the great efforts made in
our national body to protect and perpetuate this species
of traffic.
Who does not know how our great men are outdoing themselves,
in declaiming against the foreign slave-trade.
There are a perfect host of Clarksons and Wilberforces*
risen up among us on that subject, most edifying to
hear and behold. Trading negroes from Africa,
dear reader, is so horrid! It is not to be thought
of! But trading them from Kentucky,—that’s
quite another thing!
* Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) and William
Wilberforce (1759- 1833), English philanthropists
and anti-slavery agitators who helped to secure
passage of the Emancipation Bill by Parliament
in 1833.
CHAPTER XIII
Copyrights
Uncle Tom's Cabin from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
