The extremity of life and work on the frontier lands of the Deep South was itself a valve. When a Virginia planter was asked, in 1840, if he feared for his life at the hands of his slaves, he said he had no such worries. The hardness of the frontier offered him protection. “God, in his Providence, had opened for them a safety valve in the extreme southern states, which purchased their slaves and worked them to death in seven years.”
