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