[89] The Negro in Africa and America, 88, 89. Italics mine, again.
[90] Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Key, Riverside ed., vol. i. p. xviii.
[91] These quotations from The Author’s Introduction, Riverside ed., lviii, lix. The last sentence italicized by me.
[92] Tremont Temple Lecture, Stephens, War between the States, vol. i. 641. The italics are mine.
[93] Professor DuBois, born in 1868, in New England, whose writings show that his mind has been soaked to saturation in abolition misstatement and bitterness, and that consequently he is utterly unfamiliar with either the average negro slave of the south and the conditions and effects of slavery in the section, attributes the present unchastity of the negroes to the frequent separation of man and wife by the master. Here is what he says:
“The plague-spot in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation. This is no sudden development, nor the fruit of emancipation. It is the plain heritage from slavery. In those days Sam, with his master’s consent, took up with Mary. No ceremony was necessary, and in the busy life of the great plantations of the Black Belt it was usually dispensed with. If now the master needed Sam’s work in another part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to sell the slave, Sam’s married life with Mary was usually unceremoniously broken, and then it was clearly to the master’s interest to have both of them take new mates. This widespread custom of two centuries has not been eradicated in thirty years.” The Souls of Black Folk, 142.
This statement is utterly untrue, as Professor DuBois can easily find out from thousands of most credible witnesses. I never knew of a single such separation. Of course, I will not say that there were none at all. But I do say, in contradiction of his assertion, as flat as contradiction can be, that the separations which he describes were not common. Every impartial investigator who has formed his opinion from the actual evidence knows that the unchastity of the negro slave of America was an inheritance from Africa. I do not dispute the assertion often made that there were and are still chaste negro tribes of that continent. But our negroes did not come from them. They came from the West Africans, accurately described above in citations from Mr. Tillinghast.
[94] Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Key, Riverside ed., vol. i. p. lxxxix sq.
[95] Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Key, Riverside ed., vol. ii. 273.
[96] Georgians, 128.