Page:A defence of the negro race in America from the assaults and charges of Rev. J. L. Tucker.djvu/13

 functions of the race, under slavery were 1st. , and 2d. . This is the most serious feature of the whole slave system; and upon it a volume might be written. But I confine myself to the statement of a few simple glaring facts.

In speaking of the licentious and demoralizing nature of slavery, I am speaking of it's general influences. I have no time to waste upon exceptional features. There are black men who tell me that all slave-holders were tyrants and Legrees; but such men I know to be fanatics. There are white men who tell me that slave-holders in general were fathers to their slaves; but such men are manifestly fools. Slaveholders, like all other sorts of men were divided into two classes—the good and the bad—the good, like Baronial lords, like Patriarchs of old, like the grand aristocrats of civilized society, were kind, generous, humane, and fatherly; they were ; and there was a large class of such men. The bad, and they were the mass of slaveholders, were full of greed, tyranny, unscrupulousness, and carnality. They herded their slaves together like animals. They were allowed to breed like cattle. The marriage relation was utterly disregarded. All through the rural districts, on numerous plantations, the slaves for generations merely mated and cohabited, as beasts. They were seperated at convenience, caprice, or at the call of interest. When separated each took up with other men or women as lust or inclination prompted. Masters and ministers of the gospel taught their slaves, not only that there was no sin in such alliances, but that it was their duty to make new alliances and exercise the animal function of breeding. And hence the cases are numerous where men, sold from one plantation to another, have had six and eight living wives; and women, as many living husbands. Nay more than this, I have the testimony where one man less than fifty years old was the father of over sixty children; of another man who