If evil communications corrupt good manners, the intimate intercourse of the whites with these people must be depraving: nor can the exercise of despotic power by the masters, their wives and children be otherwise than unfavorable to the benevolent affections.
Tappan warns that close relationships between whites and enslaved people can lead to moral corruption among the former.
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Hence with them slavery is the INSTITUTION of the SOUTH, while it is in fact the institution of only a portion of the people of the south.
You have lamentable experience, that such is not the case where slaveholders bear rule.
If we are permitted to apply this rule in testing the moral condition of the South, the result will not be favorable.
It, is however, worthy of remark, that its cultivation affords a livelihood to only a small proportion of the free inhabitants; and scarcely to any of those we are now addressing.