“Aunt! now I see what you meant by our sleeping on a volcano.”

“Yes,” said I, “we at the North often speak of you Southerners as sleeping on a volcano.  Our idea is that the blacks here are prisoners, stealing about in a sulky mood, vengeance brooding in their hearts, and that they wait for their time of deliverance, as prisoners in our state-prison watch their chance to escape.”

“Well,” said she, “believe I am the only slave on the premises.  I am sure that no one but myself is watching for a chance to escape.  I would run away from these people if I could.  But what shall I do with them?  I am not willing to sell them, for when I have hinted at leaving, there is such entreaty for me to remain, and such demonstrations of affection and attachment, that I give it up.

“Here,” said she, “are seven house-servants, large and small, to do work which at the North a man and two capable girls would easily do.  I have to devise ways to subdivide work and give each a share.  My husband carried it so far that he had one boy to black boots and another shoes, and these two ‘bureaus’ were kept separate.”

“Oh,” said I, “what a curse slavery is to you!”

“As to that,” said she, “it is the negroes who are a curse, not their slavery.  So long as they are on the same soil with us, the subordination which slavery establishes makes it the least of two evils.  If there is any curse in the case, it is the blacks themselves, not their slavery.  Were it not for their enslavement to us, we should hate them and drive them away, like Indiana and Illinois and Oregon and Kansas.  Now we cherish them, and their interests are ours.

“Two distinct races,” said she, “never have been able to live together unless one was subordinate and dependent.  This, you know, all history teaches.  Your fanatics say it should not be so; they talk about liberty, equality, and fraternity, and put guns and pikes into the hands of the inferior race, here, to help them ‘rise in the scale of being,’ as they term it.  What God means to accomplish in this matter of slavery I do not see.

“Suppose, merely for illustration,” said she, “that cotton should be superseded.  Vast numbers of our slaves might then be useless here.  What would become of them?  We should implore the North to relieve us of them, in part.  Then would rise up the Northern antipathy to the negro, stronger, probably, in the abolitionist than in the pro-slavery man; and as we sought to remove the negroes northward and westward, the Free States would invoke the Supreme Court, and the Dred Scott decision, and then we should see, with a witness, whether the black man has ’any rights’ on free soil ‘which the’ original settlers ’are bound to respect.’  Think of bleeding Kansas, even, refusing to incorporate negro-suffrage in her constitution, when left free to follow the dictates of common sense, and a wise self-interest.  I sometimes think that that one thing, as a philosophical fact, is worth all the trouble which Kansas has cost.  It cannot be ‘unholy prejudice against color.’  It is human nature asserting the laws which God has established in it.