Is any sickly sentimentalist shocked at these recitals? Be of stout heart! Do not Christian bishops, and hundreds of other reverend fathers,—the messengers of God's everlasting truth to our souls,—assure us that slavery, "AS IT EXISTS," is right; and that, consequently, the fundamental maxim of slavery, "the child follows the condition of the mother," is right also! Why, then, should not the children of slave-women by white fathers be rightfully slaves? Of what consequence, then, is the pollution of the soul of the mother, compared with the fact of her increased value as a commodity? How utterly insignificant is the fact that a father holds his own children in slavery, compared with the advantages notoriously derived from such an improvement in the slave-stock? In sober, literal truth, the brother owns the body of his sister, and the sister that of her brother,—so sacred is the marriage-state of slaves! If the father wishes to repair the wrong he has done, the law forbids his teaching his own child to read or write! If he is poor, too poor to pay his debts, a creditor may seize his child in its very cradle, and sell it at auction to pay the debt! It ought not to be otherwise! Is it not agreeable to the order of Divine Providence, that a child should be sold to pay his father's debts? How fitting it is for Mr. Jones and Bishop Freeman to teach such a vendible commodity to say, "Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother"!
Does any reader still doubt whether an owner thus has uncontrolled authority over the body of his female slave? Let him read the following extract from an opinion of the Supreme Court of the State of North Carolina,—the Old North State, whence Bishop Ives has long since ceased to weep over the "imaginary sufferings" of the slaves! To avoid a chastisement, a female slave ran off, and, on her refusal to stop when called, was shot at and wounded. Judge Ruffin, in delivering the opinion of the court (State vs. Mann, 2 Dev. Rep. 263), says:—
"The inquiry here is, whether a cruel and unreasonable battery on a slave by the hirer is indictable?... In criminal proceedings, and, indeed, in reference to all other persons but the general owner, the hirer and possessor of a slave, in relation to both rights and duties, is, for the time being, the owner....
"With slavery it is far otherwise. The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public peace. The subject is one doomed in his own person, and in his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without capacity to make any thing his own, and to toil that others may reap the fruits.
"What moral considerations shall be addressed to such a being to convince him what it is impossible but that the most stupid must feel and know can never be true, that he is thus to labor upon a principle of natural duty, or for the sake of his own personal happiness? Such services can only be expected from one who has no will of his own, who surrenders his will in explicit obedience to that of another. Such obedience is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect. The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect. I most freely confess my sense of the harshness of this proposition. I feel it as deeply as any man can. And, as a principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But, in the actual condition of things, it must be so. There is no remedy. This discipline belongs to slavery."[O]
Judge Ruffin had not enjoyed the benefit of the instruction imparted some years later by Bishops Ives and Freeman. If he had, he would not thus have followed the dictate of a "desperately wicked" heart, and have repudiated the discipline of slavery as morally wrong!
The Rev. Robert J. Breckenridge, of the Presbyterian Church, himself a slaveholder, was a delegate to the State Emancipation Convention recently held in Kentucky. In a speech made by him before the Convention, he is reported to have said ("Louisville Examiner"), that—
"The system of slavery denies to a whole class of human beings the sacredness of marriage and of home, compelling them to live in a state of concubinage; for, in the eye of the law, no colored slave-man is the husband of any wife in particular, nor any slave-woman the wife of any husband in particular; no slave-man is the father of any children in particular, and no slave-child is the child of any parent in particular."
Who will venture even to conceive, much less compute, the deep degradation caused by the denial of marriage to the slaves?