Take the laborer's wages in the South, and the law stands to defend you, and beat him down.
Henry Ward Beecher
The Public Record
Henry Ward Beecher was an American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, and speaker, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, his emphasis on God's love, and his 1875 adultery trial. His rhetorical focus on the love of Christ has influenced mainstream Christianity through the 21st century.
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Beat a man, in the North, for a private wrong done, and the law will strike you.
But in the South, it is the right of the white, unquestioned and unquestionable to beat every third person in the community.
Let the proudest mill-owner break but the skin of the poorest operative in Lowell or Lawrence, and both law and public sentiment, alike, would grasp and punish him!
But in the South the law refuses to look at any degree of cruelty in chastisements upon the universal laborer, short of maiming or death, and public sentiment is but little better than the law.
The laborer in the North answers to a tribunal; in the South, to a master, incensed, passionate, vindictive in justice executed upon all symptoms of resisting manhood!
In the North, nothing is more sacred than a man's family and his children.
It would not be possible for a man to do public violence to a family circle without vindictive penalty.
In the South it is a part of the civil rights of men to do these things whenever they please.
And though public sentiment is better than law, yet as no public sentiment on earth is a match for legalized lust, or avarice, or the grip of misfortune, these things are continually done, and remorselessly.
Cruelty, chastity, virtue, do not mean the same things in the South as in the North.
If he must stand by what he is, how surely must he be given over to weakness, to abuse, to oppressions.