Believe it or not, Solomon Northrup, African-American
author of Twelve Years a Slave, had some good things to say about some Southern slaveholders! He wrote:
“While
living at the United States Hotel, I frequently met with slaves, who had
accompanied their masters from the South. They were always well dressed and
well provided for, leading apparently an easy life, with but few of its
ordinary troubles to perplex them. Many times they entered into conversation
with me on the subject of Slavery.”1345
* * *
“Our master's name was William Ford. He
resided then in the “Great Pine Woods,” in the parish of Avoyelles, situated on
the right bank of Red River, in the heart of Louisiana. He is now a Baptist
preacher. Throughout the whole parish of Avoyelles, and especially along both
shores of Bayou Boeuf, where he is more intimately known, he is accounted by
his fellow-citizens as a worthy minister of God. In many northern minds,
perhaps, the idea of a man holding his brother man in servitude, and the
traffic in human flesh, may seem altogether incompatible with their conceptions
of a moral or religious life. From descriptions of such men as Burch and
Freeman, and others hereinafter mentioned, they are led to despise and execrate
the whole class of slaveholders, indiscriminately. But I was sometime his
slave, and had an opportunity of learning well his character and disposition,
and it is but simple justice to him when I say, in my opinion, there never was
a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man than William Ford. The influences and
associations that had always surrounded him, blinded him to the inherent wrong
at the bottom of the system of Slavery. He never doubted the moral right of one
man holding another in subjection. Looking through the same medium with his fathers
before him, he saw things in the same light. Brought up under other
circumstances and other influences, his notions would undoubtedly have been
different. Nevertheless, he was a model master, walking uprightly, according to
the light of his understanding, and fortunate was the slave who came to his
possession. Were all men such as he, Slavery would be deprived of more than
half its bitterness."1346
* * *
“This estate is now owned by Miss Mary McCoy,
a lovely girl, some twenty years of age. She is the beauty and the glory of
Bayou Bouef. She owns about a hundred working hands, besides a great many house
servants, yard boys, and young children. . . She is beloved by all her slaves,
and good reason indeed have they to be thankful that they have fallen into such
gentle hands. Nowhere on the bayou are there such feasts, such merrymaking, as
at young Madam McCoy’s. Thither, more than to any other place, do the old and
the young for miles around love to repair in the time of the Christmas holiday;
for nowhere else can they find such delicious repasts; nowhere else can they
hear a voice speaking to them so pleasantly. No one is so well beloved – no one
fills so large a space in the hearts of a thousand slaves, as young Madam
McCoy, the orphan mistress of the old Norwood estate.”1347
Footnotes for above selections from Prison & Slavery - A Surprising Comparison:
1345
Solomon
Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, pg 25 @ docsouth.unc.edu.
1346
Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave,
pgs 89-90 @ docsouth.unc.edu.