A Southside View of Slavery

Few who agitated against Southern slavery in the Nineteenth Century had ever seen it with their own eyes. His mind occupied with Abolitionist propaganda, Nehemiah Adams journeyed from Boston to the South to witness the "horrors" of slavery for himself. Instead of the expected scenes of cowing slaves, whose humanity was being crushed by cruel bondage, what he found was a well-ordered society in which the Negroes were mainly content, well-cared for by their masters, and even evangelized. The author warns his Northern brethren that a continued assault upon the South's "peculiar institution" would lead to a destruction of the Union and the ultimate ruin of the Black population. Of particular interest is the chapter written in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's fictional romance, Uncle Tom's Cabin.