the holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery. they are professedly a custom established by the benevolence of the slaveholders; but i undertake to say, it is the result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the down-trodden slave. they do not give the slaves this time because they would not like to have their work during its continuance, but because they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it. this will be seen by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of their beginning