Letter from a Slaveholder.
Biloxi, (Miss.) Mar. 26, 1850.
F. Douglass:
I am in receipt of your letter of the 26th Feb., in which you remind me that I owe you two dollars. I herewith send that amount. Instead of adding another subscriber to your list, allow me to withdraw my name. I never was voluntarily your subscriber, as you know; and you published the circumstances under which I became so, in the first paper you sent me. The papers I have received have disappointed me. From what had been said of you by your friends, and what I had seen of you and heard from you, while you were addressing a crowd of your own friends, in your adopted State, on one of the few occasions that I have ever been out of the slave States, I believed that you would do good, by exposing in strong language, the too common practice among many of the Creole population of Louisiana; such as requiring slaves [illegible] 'on a part' of every Sunday, providing them scanty food and clothing, and in some instances inflicting punishments which [illegible] and degrade the slave, and destroy his health and usefulness. I thought that an exposure by you, in other States, of the unusual cruelties practised, which had fallen under your observation, would have the effect of removing those oppressions upon the black man, and of benefitting his physical condition. To effect this, I thought you would deal with the subject candidly; that your object being to "benefit the perishing slave," your strong common sense would induce you to hold yourself strictly within the bounds of truth; that your pictures and descriptions would not be so highly colored, as not to be recognised by the slaveholders. I was prepared to make many allowances on account of your past conditionーto excuse slight embellishments, and pardon small exaggerations. In all this, I have been disappointed. Indeed your whole policy was misconceived. Your indiscriminate abuse of slaveholdersーyour inflammatory appeals to your colored and white brethren of the North,ーyour violence and wontonness in attacking the Constitution of our common country, and your willingness to see it violated in the most open and palpable manner, have convinced me that you are doing harm to the black race, and more firmly revetting their chains. I am not, therefore, your "dear friend," as you style me; I am not a co-worker with you in your crusade against the best interests of your race. I have heard you patiently for one year. I took your paper because it was offered as an argument by one of your friends, and I was willing to listen, not only to what your friends had to say on these exciting subjects. Deliberately and calmly I decide against you, your paper and your cause.
As far back as I can trace my ancestry, they were slaveholdersーnot "slave-dealers;" and without any desire to act on my own part, I have been always a slaveholder. I am working 122 slaves at my brick-works at this place. Some I own, and some I have hired. I work negroes, because their labor, from the very nature of the institution, under a Southern sun, can alone be relied upon with certainty; and not because slave labor is more profitable than white labor would be, if we had no slaves. If I could will the institution of slavery out of existence to-morrow, to-morrow there would be no other than voluntary slavery on this continent; and by the annihilation of the institution of slavery, I should feel that I had benefited my own more than the black race.
In conclusion, I must add my firm belief, that it is not in the power of any human being to benefit the present condition of the slave, when owned and cared for by an honest man.
You will oblige me by a discontinuance of your paper.
Respectfully, &c.
W. G. KendallKendall, William Grey

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