One morning in 1856, while travelling through the South to research his anti-slavery tract The Cotton Kingdom, Frederick Law Olmsted accompanied the manager of a plantation in Alabama on his daily rounds. It was the beginning of the planting season, and Olmsted observed gangs of slaves plowing and hoeing under the watchful eye of white overseers. Dismayed at the regularity with which the overseers threatened to whip their charges if they did not pick up the pace, Olmsted questioned one of the overseers:'It must be disagreeable to have to punish them as you do?''I think nothing of it,'replied the man.'Why, sir, I wouldn't mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog." The comparison on which the overseer based his response-equating a slave with a domestic animal-is one that occurs repeatedly in accounts of slavery in the American South. At times, as in the above case, it was made by whites; other times, it was a parallel that blacks themselves drew to underscore the dehumanizing features of slavery.'[The slave trader] would buy all the time-buy and sell niggers just like hogs,'recalled one ex-slave.'The way we traveled as slaves was just about like you have seen people drive cattle to market,'stated another. 2 In Zora Neale Hurston's