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12 THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD Given this belief, it’s not surprising that slave owners frequently fell into the sentimental delusion that their slaves were grateful and loyal to them. An antebellum lithograph nicely captures this idealized vision of the master-slave relationship. On a visit to the slave quarters, a master and his family are entertained by happily dancing slaves while an aged slave obsequiously says, “God Bless you massa! You feed and clothe us. When we are sick you nurse us, and when too old to work, you provide for us!” 4 The conviction that their slaves were contentedly grateful was so deeply engrained that slave owners were often startled and grieved when circumstances suggested a quite different picture. Mississippi planter John Quitman, convinced as he was of his servant’s absolute loyalty, was shaken when his slave John ran. As Quitman’s son wrote in bewilderment, “I myself have heard [ John] say, that if it were in the power of these abo- litionists to give him a thousand freedoms, he would not desert us.” 5 It apparently never occurred to the Quitman family that their slaves gener- ally told them only what they wanted to hear. A similar sense of betrayal was expressed when Sarah Logue of Tennessee wrote to her runaway slave Jermain Loguen: “You know that we reared you as we reared our own children that you was never abused, and that shortly before you ran away, when your master asked you if you would like to be sold, you said you would not leave him to go with anybody.” 6 Although Loguen had escaped nearly 30 years earlier, his desertion still rankled his ex-mistress. But alongside slave owners’ deluded convictions that their own slaves were happy and loyal was their anxious and pervasive suspicion that slaves in general, as Georgia planter John Jacobus Flournoy put it, had “a natural disposition to endless riot [and] for the work of carnage and insurrection.” 7 Many Southern whites also believed that blacks were un- reliable. In 1815, for example, Roswell King, overseer of the huge Georgia plantation owned by Pierce Butler, wrote his employer about the loss of nearly 140 absconding slaves. He regretted the rascally ingratitude of the members of the “Ethiopian race” who fl ed the plantation, and he warned Butler that the remaining slaves were just as likely to betray their master’s trust: “I know they would have gone off if they only had a chance.” 8 That these attitudes were inconsistent with the belief that slaves were also “naturally disposed” to be helpless without and thus endlessly grateful for their master’s patronage seems to have gone largely unnoticed. Right