A Cheerful View of Slavery

Charles Lyell
8 pages (2007/1845); 130KB download
WOWIO Books; ISBN: WOWIO-00233

DESCRIPTION

In 1841 Scottish geologist Charles Lyell traveled in the United States, witnessing farming occupations and domestic services in Georgia and South Carolina. He noted that he did not observe slaves working under overseers on sugar plantations, but the farm and domestic slaves he encountered he found "remarkably cheerful and lighthearted."

Whatever the interpretation, Lyell's account provides part of the mosaic painting a picture of the actual conditions of slavery in those states in the decades leading up to the U.S. Civil War.