Another charge against us is, that our laws abrogated the rights of marriage among slaves, authorized their capricious separation by masters, and thus consigned them to promiscuous concubinage, like that of beasts. Now, first, admitting defect in our legislation here, let us ask, how much of the blame of the continuance of this defect is chargeable upon the frantic attacks of abolitionists upon us? Every sensible man can understand, that a people so fiercely assailed in their vital rights should be occupied solely by righteous defence, and should feel the time unsuited for the discussion of innovations, however needful. And next, let it be understood what the South has really done, and has not done, herein, and it will appear that an amazing misrepresentation is made of the whole case. The form of the charge usually is, that our laws deprived the slaves of all marital rights. This is, first, a monstrous perversion of the facts, in that the Africans never had any marital rights or domestic institutions to be deprived of. Have men forgotten, that in their native country there was no marriage, and no marriage law, but the negroes either lived in vagrant concubinage, or held their plurality of wives as slaves, to be either sold or slain at will? They have, at least, lost nothing, then; and the utmost that could be charged upon our legislation is, that it did not undertake to innovate upon their own native usages; that it did not force upon them marital restraints, and penalties for their breach, which the Africans were disqualified either to understand or value, which they would have regarded as a more cruel burden than their bondage. Next, our laws did not, as many seem to represent, prohibit, or delegalize the marriage of slaves; but were simply silent about them. The meaning of this silence was, to leave the whole matter to the controul of the master. It appears almost impossible for anti-slavery men to be made to apprehend the nature of the institution, as described in the words, 'domestic slavery.' Their minds, perverted with vain dreams of the powers and perfectibility of the State, cannot be made to apprehend that God has made other parties than the commonwealth and the civil magistrate, depositories of ruling power; and that this arrangement is right and benevolent. Now, it is the genius of slavery, to make the family the slave's commonwealth. The family is his State. The master is his magistrate and legislator, in all save certain of the graver criminal relations, in which the commonwealth deals directly and personally with him. He is a member of municipal society only through his master, who represents him. The commonwealth knows him as only a life-long minor under the master's tutelage. The integers of which the commonwealth aggregate is made up, are not single human beings, but single families, authoritatively represented in the father and master. And this is the fundamental difference between the theory of the Bible, and that of radical democracy. The silence of our laws, then, concerning the marriage of slaves, means precisely this: that the whole subject is remitted to the master, the chief magistrate of the little integral commonwealth, the family. Obviously, therefore, the question whether our laws were defective therein, is in no sense a question between the living of the slaves in marriage or in beastly license; it is only a question whether, in the distribution of ruling functions, those of the master were not made too large and responsible, herein. And if error be admitted in this respect, it cannot be one which makes the relation of servitude sinful; for then the same crime must be fixed on all the patriarchs, notwithstanding their care in rightly ordering and preserving, as family heads, the marital relations of their children and slaves, because, forsooth, there happened to be no commonwealth law above them, as patriarchs, regulative of these marriages. This is nonsense. Where the modern patriarch, the Southern master, rightly ordered and protected the marriage relations of his slaves, the silence of the commonwealth no more made their connexions concubinage, than were those of Isaac, and of Abraham's steward, Eliezer of Damascus. What magistrate or legislature, other than Abraham, issued their marriage license? Who else enforced their marriage law or defined its rights? What civic agent solemnized the ceremonial for them? And this leads to another remark: that that ceremonial is wholly unessential to the validity of marriage. Of course, where the laws enjoin it for any class, every good citizen will observe it. But the absence of such ordained ceremonial does not make lawful marriage impossible. In this sense, consensus facit nuptias. It was thus that the holiest wedlock ever seen on earth was instituted, that of Adam and Eve; thus Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, were united. The fact that our laws pronounce the unions of Quakers and of Jews, legitimate marriage, although announced with different forms, and indeed almost without form, evinces this truth.
Now, then, for the facts. These facts are, that marriage in its substance was as much recognized among our servants as among any other peasantry; that the union was uniformly instituted upon a formal written license of the two masters; that it was almost always sanctioned by a religious ceremonial conducted by a minister; that the regularity of the connexion was uniformly recognized by the master's assigning the husband and wife their own dwelling; that the moral opinion of both whites and blacks made precisely the same distinction between this connexion and the illicit ones, and between the fruits of it as legitimate, and the fruits of concubinage as illegitimate, which publick opinion establishes for white persons: and that even the criminal law recognized it as a regular connexion, by extending to the black man who slew the violator of his bed in heat of blood, the same forbearance which it extends to the outraged husband. How can it be said, in the face of these facts, that marriage did not exist among them?
But, it is asked, did not the master possess power to separate this union at his will; and was not this power often exercised? They did. The power, relatively, was not often exercised; and when the separation was not justified by the crimes of the parties, it met the steady and increasing reprobation of publick opinion. The instances of tyrannical separation were, at most, far fewer than the harsh tyranny of destitution imposes on poor whites in all other countries; and the pretended philanthropy of the Yankees has, in five years, torn asunder more families than all the slave dealers of the South did in a hundred. But the power of separating was sometimes abused by masters; and the room for this abuse was just the defect in our laws, which nearly all Southern Christians deplored, and which they desired to repair. Justice requires the testimony, on the other hand, that the relaxed morals which prevailed among the Africans was not the result of their marital relations, as arranged among us, but the heritage of their paganism; that under our system the evil was decreasing; and that since their emancipation and nominal subjection to the marriage law of the whites, a flood of licentiousness, vagrant concubinage, and infanticide, has broken out again among them. Clear proof this, that our abused system was better adapted to their character than the present.
Anti-slavery men often talk as though the right of slave parents to the controul and education of their children, were so indefeasible and native, that it is a natural wrong to permit the authority of the master over them to override that of the parents. This we utterly deny. We have the authority of Locke himself for saying that the parental authority is correlative to the parental obligation to preserve and train the child; that it is, therefore, not indefeasible; that if the father is clearly incompetent to or unwilling for his duty, his authority often is, and of right ought to be, transferred by society to another. When, therefore, the civilized master uses his authority against and over that of the semi-civilized, or savage parent, to train the slave child to habits of decency, industry, intelligence, and virtue, which his degraded natural guardians are unable or unwilling to inculcate, he does no crime against nature, but an act just and beneficent.
The most odious part of this charge is, that slavery made the chastity of the female slave the property of her master. We meet this with an emphatic denial. It is false. The laws of Virginia protect the virtue of the female slave by the very same statute which shields that of the white lady, even against her own master. The law of rape, until 1849, used these words:[[86]] "If any man do ravish a woman," &c. The act of 1849 used the words:[[87]] "If any white person do carnally know a female of the age of twelve years or more, against her will, by force, or carnally know a female child, under that age," &c. (If the ravisher were a negro the penalty was different.) The question is, whether the words "a woman," and "a female," were intended to include coloured persons and slaves. The answer uniformly given by Virginian lawyers to this question is affirmative. They say that the terms are the most general in our statutory vocabulary. The law of 1849, just quoted, clearly implies that the terms "a female," in § 15, are inclusive of coloured females, by expressly introducing the word "white," "a white female," in § 16, when its purpose was to enact a special penalty for the forcible abduction of that class. The General Court has held that female is synonymous with woman,[[88]] and may be substituted for it even in an indictment. Is it asked, why the appeal is not made to judicial decisions, as conclusive authority of the true intent of the statute? We have caused a thorough search to be made by the most competent authority in Richmond; and while many indictments are found against black men for rape of white women, none exist, in the history of our jurisprudence, against white men for rape of black women. And this, not because there would have been any difficulty in making the indictment lie: but because, as the most experienced lawyers testify, the crime is unheard of on the part of white men amongst us.
It is undoubtedly true, that the moral sense of the Africans on this subject is low: that many voluntary breaches of chastity occur among themselves, and some between them and whites. But the latter are far less frequent than similar sins in Philadelphia, in Boston, in London. Notwithstanding the sad inheritance of vice drawn by the Africans from their pagan ancestors, Southern slavery had elevated them so far, that illegitimate births among them had become far fewer than among the boasted white peasantry of Protestant Scotland, with all its Bibles and churches, and parochial schools. This fact can be proved by Scotch statistics. The odious and filthy charge which the abolitionists make against the Southern people and against slavery, as a system of lust, also receives a terrible reply from the returns of the American census. When illicit cohabitation takes place between the whites and the blacks, nature tells the secret with infallible accuracy, in the yellow skin of the offspring. The census of 1850 distinguished the full blacks from the mulattoes, both among the slave and free. Of the slaves, one in twelve was mulatto, taking the whole United States together. Of the slaves in Virginia the ratio of mulattoes to blacks was about the same. In South Carolina there was only one mulatto to thirty-one black slaves! The explanation is, that the latter State, being less commercial and manufacturing than Virginia, and having a system of more perfect agricultural slavery, exposed her slaves less to intercourse with immigrant and transient whites. But taking the United States as a whole, the free mulattoes were more than half as numerous as the free blacks! In several of the slave States they are more numerous; and in Ohio, the stronghold of Black Republicanism, there were fourteen thousand mulattoes to eleven thousand blacks. Since the regular marriage of free blacks to the whites was as unknown at the North as at the South, these figures tell a tale as to the comparative prevalence of this infamous and unnatural form of uncleanness among the Yankees, which should forever seal their lips from reproaches of us. They also show that at the South the state of slavery has been far more favourable to chastity among the coloured people than that of freedom.
The reader probably feels by this time, that if we speak truth, then was slavery a very different thing practically from its usual picture abroad. He will perhaps feel with a shade of skepticism, that it is strange the world should have been so much mistaken. The chief explanation we offer of so strange a fact, is that trait of abolitionists, our interested and unscrupulous accusers, predicted by St. Paul: ("men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth.") The world will find them out in due time: the statements made of the events of the late war have done much to unmask them. Still another cause is that Europeans, and even Yankees, are so ignorant of Southern society. Still another explanation is, that slavery in the British colonies, from which the people of that Empire have chiefly derived their conceptions, actually was far more harsh and barbarous than in this country. The reader is emphatically cautioned that he must not judge slavery in Virginia by slavery in Jamaica or Guiana. Whether the charge of the great Paley is correct, who accounts for this difference by the greater harshness of British character,[[89]] politeness may forbid us to decide. But the comparative fates of the Africans in the British colonies, and those in our States, tell the contrast between the humanity of our system, and the barbarity of theirs, in terms of indisputable clearness. If political science has ascertained any law, it is that the well or ill-being of a people powerfully affects their increase or decrease of numbers. The climate of the British Indies is salubrious for blacks. Yet, of the one million seven hundred thousand Africans imported into the British colonies, and their increase, only six hundred and sixty thousand remained to be emancipated in 1832. The three hundred and seventy-five thousand (the total) imported into the Southern States, had multiplied to four millions. Such is the contrast! How grinding and ruthless must have been that oppression which in the one case reduced this prolific race, in the most fertile and genial spots of earth, in the ratio of five to two! And how generous and beneficent that government which, in the Southern States, nursed them to a more than ten-fold increase, in a less hospitable and fruitful clime! Well may we demur to have the world take its conceptions of our slavery from the British.
We trust that we shall proceed, then, to the remaining discussion of the moral character of slavery, with a just understanding of what is to be defended. It is simply that system which makes the involuntary labour of the servant the property of the master, and gives the latter such controul over the former's person, as will secure his possession of the labour. We conclude this section with a few words touching the admitted abuses of the system. That such existed among us, both legislative and individual, is fully admitted. There were cruel masters. Slaves were sometimes refused that which the apostle enjoined masters to give them, as "just and equal." Some cruel punishments were inflicted. A few slaves have been tortured to death. Some wives and children were wickedly torn from their husbands and parents. And our laws in some points failed to secure to the slaves that to which their humanity entitled them. But we repeat, these things prove only the sinfulness of the individual agent, and not of the system of which they are incidents. Fathers have been known to maltreat, scourge, maim and murder their children; and husbands their wives; but no one dreams that these things evince the unrighteousness of the family relations. Wife-murder is doubtless more frequent in the State of New York, than slave-murder was in Virginia. The laws of the State of Indiana concerning divorce are, in some particulars, glaring violations of God's laws. Yet no one dreams of arguing thence, that to have a wife in those States is a sin. Unless the abuse can be shown to be an essential part of the system, it proves nothing against the lawfulness of the system itself. But that none of these crimes against slaves are essential parts of slavery, is proved by the fact, which we fearlessly declare, that the vast majority of slaves in our country never experienced any of them. The unfairness of this mode of arguing cannot be better stated than in the words of Dr. Van Dyke, of New York:
"Their mode of arguing the question of slaveholding, by a pretended appeal to facts, is a tissue of misrepresentation from beginning to end. Let me illustrate my meaning by a parallel case. Suppose I undertake to prove the wickedness of marriage, as it exists in the city of New York. In this discussion suppose the Bible is excluded, or, at least, that it is not recognized as having exclusive jurisdiction in the decision of the question. My first appeal is to the statute law of the State.
"I show there enactments which nullify the law of God, and make divorce a marketable and cheap commodity. I collect the advertisements of your daily papers, in which lawyers offer to procure the legal separation of man and wife for a stipulated price, to say nothing, in this sacred place, of other advertisements which decency forbids me to quote. Then I turn to the records of our criminal courts, and find that every day some cruel husband beats his wife, or some unnatural parent murders his child, or some discontented wife or husband seeks the dissolution of the marriage bond. In the next place, I turn to the orphan asylums and hospitals, and show there the miserable wrecks of domestic tyranny in wives deserted and children maimed by drunken parents. In the last place, I go through our streets, and into our tenement houses, and count the thousands of ragged children, who, amid ignorance and filth, are training for the prison and gallows.