The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and
inhumanity of slavery. They are professedly a custom established by
the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the
result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the
down-trodden slave. They do not give the slaves this time because they
would not like to have their work during its continuance, but because
they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it. This will be seen
by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those
days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of
their beginning. Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with
freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation. For
instance, the slaveholders not only like to see the slave drink of his
own accord, but will adopt various plans to make him drunk. One plan
is, to make bets on their slaves, as to who can drink the most whisky
without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole
multitudes to drink to excess. Thus, when the slave asks for virtuous
freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance, cheats him
with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled with the name of
liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the result was just
what might be supposed; many of us were led to think that there was
little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly
too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum.
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