Download or read book Neither More Nor Less Than Men written by Mills Lane and published by Beehive Press (GA). This book was released on 1993 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slaveowners and their slaves were real people, and slavery, like most human institutions, was both kind and cruel, sometimes benevolent paternalism borne with patience and good will, sometimes harsh injustice endured. Twenty-five documents, or groups of documents, reveal aspects of this complicated institution, which existed in many different forms in many different places. The ideal of plantation life is represented by the slave code, essays on slave mangement and pro-slavery propaganda. Four travellers visit one great planter, James Hamilton Couper, and describe his vast plantations and the labors, houses, food and clothes of his several hundred bondsmen. The plain realities of daily life are reflected in the letters of plantation owners and their overseers. The autobiographies of fugitive slaves and the recollection of former slaves illustrate the good-bedside-evil contradictions of slavery as well as the dark side of plantation life.