General Robert E. Lee Discusses Conditions of Laborers and Black Slaves.

Excerpt from With Lee in Virginia, G.A. Henty, pp. 2,3

"There are good plantations and bad plantations, Vincent; and there are many more good ones than bad ones. There are brutes to be found everywhere. There are bad masters in the Southern States just as there are bad landlords in every European country. But even from self-interest alone, a planter has greater reason for caring for the health and comfort of his slaves than an English farmer has in caring for the comfort of his labourers. Slaves are valuable property, and if they are over-worked or badly cared for they decrease in value. Whereas if the labourer falls sick or is unable to do his work the farmer has simply to hire another hand. It is as much the interest of a planter to keep his slaves in good health and spirits as it is for a farmer to feed and attend to his horses properly.

"Of the two, I consider that the slave with a fairly kind master is to the full as happy as the ordinary English labourer. He certainly does not work so hard, if he is ill he is careflly attended to, he is well fed, he has no cares or anxieties whatever, and when old and past work he has no fear of the work-house staring him in the face. At the same time I am quite ready to grant that there are horrible abuses possible under the laws connected with slavery ...

" ... People here are very sore at the foul slanders that have been published by Northern writers. There have been many atrocities perpetrated undoubtedly, but brutes who would have been brutes wherever they had been born; but to collect a series of such atrocities, to string them together into a story, and to hold them up, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has, as a picture of slave-life in the Southern States, is as gross a libel as if anyone were to make a collection of all the wife-beatings and assaults of drunken English ruffians, and to publish them as a picture of the average life of English people.