I set this down as partly constitutional with my race, and partly conventional.

There is no better material in the world for making a gentleman, than is furnished in the African.

He shows to others, and exacts for himself, all the tokens of respect which he is compelled to manifest toward his master.

A young slave must approach the company of the older with hat in hand, and woe betide him, if he fails to acknowledge a favor, of any sort, with the accustomed _"tank'ee,"_ &c.
So uniformly are good manners enforced among slaves, I can easily detect a "bogus" fugitive by his manners.
Among other slave notabilities of the plantation, was one called by everybody Uncle Isaac Copper.

It is seldom that a slave gets a surname from anybody in Maryland; and so completely has the south shaped the manners of the north, in this respect, that even abolitionists make very little of the surname of a Negro.