Motherhood Quote by John Sergeant Wise

The sentence performs a moral magic trick: it admits slavery in plain daylight, then tries to launder it into a story of noble responsibility. Wise starts with the bombshell - his mother had "no qualms of conscience" about owning enslaved people - and immediately shifts the frame from violence to virtue. The pivot is "sense of duty", a phrase that swaps coercion for caretaking, as if the central ethical question were not human ownership but the quality of management.

That phrasing is doing heavy cultural work. "Ownership of negroes" is presented as a neutral fact, a property relation like livestock or land, while the enslaved are flattened into needs to be met and service to be rendered. The mention of "physical needs" is telling: it narrows obligation to food, shelter, and basic maintenance, then congratulates his mother for going "far beyond" that baseline. The unstated comparison is to a caricature of the cruel slaveholder; by setting the bar at mere survival, any gesture that resembles kindness can be cast as moral surplus.

Context sharpens the intent. Wise, a white Southern memoirist writing after the Confederacy's defeat, is participating in the Lost Cause project of reputational salvage: slavery was regrettable, yes, but overseen by honorable people who felt duty-bound. It's not an argument for slavery so much as an argument for the moral decency of those who benefited from it. The subtext is exoneration - not of the institution, which he barely interrogates, but of the family name. The result is a familiar rhetorical balm: if the masters were conscientious, the system can be remembered as paternal rather than predatory.