Excerpt from The Americans at Home, Vol. 2 of 2: Pen-and-Ink Sketches of American Men, Manners and Institutions Notwithstanding the loss to which Emancipation has subjected the Southern people, and the agony of the process by which it was accomplished, I scarcely meta single man or woman who expressed regret that slavery was gone. The South feels like a man who has been subjected against his will to a severe operation - an operation which he thought would kill him, which has terribly prostrated him, from which he is still doubtful if he will completely recover, but which being fairly over, has given him prodigious relief. The anti-slavery agitation turned attention so exclusively to the burdens which the system fixed upon the slave, that few have considered the burdens which it fixed also upon the slaveholder, and the trying position in which latterly it placed him. The ownership of slaves involved a very serious responsibility. This was specially felt by those masters and mistresses who realized that the negroes, so entirely committed to their charge, were beings with souls as well as bodies, for whose moral condition, therefore, they were largely responsible. But even on the man who looked upon his negroes as only so many working animals or cotton-picking machines, slavery imposed burdens from which the employer of free labour is exempt. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books.

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