Being held as Property, and incapable of making any Contract, they cannot contract Marriage recognized by Law.

     MEN may forget or disregard the rules of logic in their reasonings about slavery, but the genius that presides over American slavery never forgets or disregards them. From its well-defined principle of human chattelhood it never departs, for a single moment. If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences. From a single fundamental axiom, all the parts of the system are logically and scientifically educed. And no man fully understands the system, who does not study it in the light of that axiom.

     The slave has no rights. Of course he, or she, cannot have the rights of a husband, a wife. The slave is a chattel, and chattels do not marry. “The slave is not ranked among sentient beings, but among things,” and things are not married.

     “Slaves are not people, in the eye of the law.

They have no legal personality.” So said Mr. Wise. So, by their votes, said the Federal Congress. But none except “people” and “persons” ever marry.

     “The slave is one who is in the power of a master to whom he belongs.” How, then, can the slave marry?

     “The legal relation of master and slave,” with all the vestal robes of its spotless innocency, and saintly Biblical paternity, has never, in this country, been held to be compatible with marriage. So early as in colonial times, when parish ministers, all over New-England, owned slaves, it was held by learned civilians, in good old Connecticut, that when a slave master, though inadvertently, gave verbal license to a female slave to marry, the license made her free. Being married, she was not a slave, and the husband bore off his prize in triumph, before her master!

     The same doctrine has always been held (though differently enunciated) at the South. Slave mothers are there licensed by their masters to be “breeders,” not wives, and thus they are retained as slaves.

     “A slave cannot even contract matrimony, the association which takes place among slaves, and is called marriage, being properly designated by the word contubernium, a relation which has no sanctity, and to which no civil rights are attached.” (Stroud's “Sketch of the Slave Laws,” p. 61.)

     “A slave has never maintained an action against the violator of his bed. A slave is not admonished for incontinence, or punished for fornication or adultery; never prosecuted for bigamy, or petty treason for killing a husband being a slave, any more than

admitted to an appeal for murder.” (Opinion of Daniel Dulaney, Esq., Attorney General of Maryland. 1 Maryland Reports, pp. 561, 563.)

     “Slaves were not entitled to the conditions of matrimony, and therefore they had no relief in cases of adultery; nor were they the proper objects of cognition or affinity, but of quasi-cognition only.” (Dr. Taylor's “Elements of the Civil Law,” p. 429.)

     “It is clear that slaves have no legal capacity to assent to any contract. With the consent of their master they may marry, and their moral power to agree to such a contract or connection cannot be doubted; but while in a state of slavery it cannot produce any civil effect, because slaves are deprived of all civil rights. Emancipation gives to the slave his civil rights, and a contract of marriage, legal and valid by the consent of the master, and moral assent of the slave, from the moment of freedom, ALTHOUGH DORMANT DURING SLAVERY, produces all the effects which result from such contract among free persons.” (Opinion of Judge Matthews, case of Girod vs. Lewis, May Term, 1819; 6 Martin's “Louisiana Reports,” p. 559. Wheeler's “Law of Slavery,” p. 199.)

     The most favorable inference from this ingenious decision is, that the joint action of master and slave can legalize a slave's marriage when he ceases to be a slave!

     The obligations of marriage are evidently inconsistent with the conditions of slavery, and cannot be performed by a slave. The husband promises to protect his wife and provide for her. The wife promises

to be the help-meet of her husband. They mutually promise to live with and cherish each other, till parted by death. But what can such promises by slaves mean? The “legal relation of master and slave” renders them void! It forbids the slave to protect even himself. It clothes his master with authority to bid him inflict deadly blows on the woman he has sworn to protect. It prohibits his possession of any property wherewith to sustain her. His labor and his hands it takes from him. It bids the woman assist, not her husband, but her owner! Nay! it gives him unlimited control and full possession of her own person, and forbids her, on pain of death, (as will be shown,) to resist him, if he drags her to his bed! It severs the plighted pair, at the will of their masters, occasionally, or for ever! The innocent “legal relation” of slave-ownership does or permits all this, and without forfeiting clerical favor, or a high seat in the Church, or in the Senate, or Presidential chair. What, then, can the marriage vows of slaves mean?

     The laws annulling slave marriage are explicit, as has been seen. The corresponding position of the judiciary, as attested by the Maryland Reports, has been adduced. Will any one inquire whether or no, in this particular, the Code be a “dead letter”? or whether the institution of marriage among slaves may not have survived the annulling action of the legislatures and the courts? As a recognized “legal relation,” most assuredly the marriage relation among slaves does not and cannot exist. The petted

”legal relation” of owner and slaves crowds it off from the platform of human society. The two “legal relations” cannot coexist. A choice must be made between the two. And those who will still persist in affirming the innocency and the validity of the “relation” of slave owner, are bound, if sincere and truthful men, to repudiate the “relation” of slave marriage. The Savannah River Baptist Association had the nerve and the consistency to do this.

     “In 1835, the following query relating to slaves was propounded to the Savannah River Baptist Association of ministers: Whether, in case of involuntary separation of such a character as to preclude all future intercourse, the parties may be allowed to marry again?”

     “ANSWER.—That such separation, among persons situated as our slaves are, is, civilly, a separation by death, and they believe that, in the sight of God, it would be so viewed. To forbid second marriages in such cases, would be to expose the parties not only to greater hardships and stronger temptations, but to church censure for acting in obedience to their masters, who cannot be expected to acquiesce in a regulation at variance with justice to the slaves, and to the spirit of that command which regulates marriage between Christians. The slaves are not free agents, and a dissolution by death is not more entirely without their consent and beyond their control than by such separation.”

     The Church is here seen submitting, with complacency, to that feature of the Slave Code that

annuls marriage! What the Southern Baptists have avowed, the other religious sects there practise. Some of the facts stated concerning the “uses of slave property” illustrate the absence of slave marriage. And so do the statistics of the domestic slave-trade. The restored institution and sanctity of marriage would cut off the supplies that gorge the slave markets.

     The Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky, in their address, have given us their testimony to the general fact and its effects. They say:

     The system “produces general licentiousness among the slaves. Marriage, as a civil ordinance, they cannot enjoy. Our laws do not recognize this relation as existing among them, and, of course, do not enforce, by any sanction, the observance of its duties. Indeed, until slavery waxeth old, and tendeth to decay, there CANNOT BE any legal recognition of the marriage rite, or the enforcement of its consequent duties. For, all the regulations on this subject would limit the master's absolute RIGHT OF PROPERTY in the slaves. In his disposal of them he could no longer be at liberty to consult merely his own interest. He could no longer separate the wife and the husband to suit the convenience or interest of the purchaser; no matter how advantageous might be the terms offered.” “Hence; all the marriages that could ever be allowed them, would be a mere contract, violable at the master's pleasure. Their present quasi marriages are continually thus voided. They are, in this way, brought to consider their matrimonial

alliances as a thing not binding, and they act accordingly. We are then assured by the most unquestionable testimony that licentiousness is the necessary result of our system.” (Address, pp. 15, 16.)

     “Chastity is no virtue among them; its violation neither injures female character in their own estimation, nor in that of their master or mistress. No instruction is ever given—no censure pronounced. I speak not of the world. I speak of Christian families generally.” (Lexington, Ky., Luminary.)

     Even in Puritan New-England, seventy years ago, female slaves, in ministers' and magistrates' families, bore children, black or yellow, without marriage. No one inquired who their fathers were, and nothing more was thought of it than of the breeding of sheep or swine. We had the facts from those who well remembered them.

     The universal testimony concerning “slave quarters” connected with plantations is, that “the sexes are herded together, promiscuously, like beasts.”

     Said a sister of President Madison to the late Rev. George Bourne, then a Presbyterian minister in Virginia: “We Southern ladies are complimented with the name of wives; but we are only the mistresses of seraglios.”

     The report of the Presbyterian Synod of Georgia, December, 1833, sustains, on this general subject, the testimony of the Synod of Kentucky.

     We have seen a well-authenticated account of a respectable Christian lady at the South, who kept a handsome mulatto female for the use of her genteel

son, as a method of deterring him, as she said, from more indiscriminate and vulgar indulgences. Undoubtedly he passed current in the first circles of respectable young ladies. In our chapter on the uses of slave property, this item would have been in place.

     The rapid and constant bleaching of colors, at the South, assures us that there is no exaggeration in these pictures. And if the Synod of Kentucky were not mistaken, the innocent “legal relation” of slave ownership is to be held responsible for it all. Where the laws annul marriage, we may be certain that “the people are not better than their laws.”