When Fanny Kemble, the English actress, retired from the stage, it was to marry a Southern planter, and her autobiography and private letters throw a flood of light upon the life of the slaves upon a typical plantation in the cotton States. She says that the planter expected that about once in seven years he must buy a new set of hands; that the slaves did little in the winter, but they worked fifteen hours a day in the spring, and often eighteen hours a day in the summer until the cotton was picked. She adds that the negro children used to beg her for a taste of meat, just as English children plead for a little candy. She states that on her husband's estate slave breeding was most important and remunerative, and that the increase and the young slaves sold made it possible for the plantation to pay its interest. "Every negro child born was worth two hundred dollars the moment it drew breath."
It was this separation of families that touched the heart of Fanny Kemble Butler, and stirred the indignation of Harriet Martineau, who at the end of her year at the South wrote that she would rather walk through a penitentiary or a lunatic asylum than through the slave quarters that stood in the rear of the great house where she was entertained. It is this element that explains the statement of John Randolph of Virginia. Conversing one evening about the notable orations to which he had listened, the great lawyer said that the most eloquent words he had ever heard were "spoken on the auction block by a slave mother." It seemed that she pleaded with the auctioneer and the spectators not to separate her from her children and her husband, and she made these men, who were trafficking in human life, realize the meaning of Christ's words, "Woe unto him that doth offend one of My little ones; it were better for him that a millstone were placed about his neck and that he were cast into the depths of the sea."
In this era of industrial education for the coloured race it is interesting to note that five of the slave States imposed heavy penalties upon any one who should teach the slaves to read or write. Virginia, however, permitted the owner to teach his slave in the interest of better management of the plantation. North Carolina finally consented to arithmetic. After 1831 and the Nat Turner negro insurrection more stringent laws were passed to prevent the slaves learning how to read, lest they chance upon abolition documents. A Georgian planter said that "The very slightest amount of education impairs their value as slaves, for it instantly destroys their contentedness; and since you do not contemplate changing their condition, it is surely doing them an ill service to destroy their acquiescence in it." In spite of the law, however, domestic servants were frequently taught to read. Frederick Douglass found a teacher in his mistress, where he was held as a domestic slave, and Douglass in turn taught his fellow slaves on the plantation by stealth. The advertisements of slaves that mention the slave's ability to read and cipher, as a reason for special value, prove that the more intelligent slaves had at least the rudiments of knowledge. Olmstead, in his "Cotton Kingdom," says he visited a plantation in Mississippi, where one of the negroes had, with the full permission of his master, taught all his fellows how to read.