Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/51

Rh children should be slaves. This law was not repealed until the end of eighteen years, and it then continued in full force with regard to those who had contracted such marriages in the intermediate time; therefore the descendants of white women so situated may be slaves unto the present day. The doctrine of the common law is that the offspring shall follow the condition of the father; but slave law (with the above temporary exception) reverses the common law, and provides that children shall follow the condition of the mother. Hence mulattoes and their descendants are held in perpetual bondage, though the father is a free white man. "Any person whose maternal ancestor, even in the remotest degree of distance, can be shown to have been a negro, Indian, mulatto, or a mestizo, not free at the time this law was introduced, although the paternal ancestor at each successive generation may have been a white free man, is declared to be the subject of perpetual slavery." Even the code of Jamaica, is on this head, more liberal than ours; by an express law, slavery ceases at the fourth degree of distance from a negro ancestor: and in the other British West Indies, the established custom is such, that quadroons or mestizoes (as they call the second and third degrees) are rarely seen in a state of slavery. Here, neither law nor public opinion favors the mulatto descendants of free white men. This furnishes a convenient game to the slave-holder—it enables him to fill his purse by means of his own vices;—the right to sell one half of his children provides a fortune for the remainder. Had the maxim of the common law been allowed,—i. e. that the offspring follows the condition of the father,—the mulattoes, almost without exception, would have been free, and thus the prodigious and alarming increase of our slave population might have been prevented. The great augmentation of the servile class in the Southern States compared with the West India colonies, has been thought to indicate a much milder form of slavery; but there are other causes, which tend to produce the result. There are much fewer white men in the British West Indies than in our slave States; hence the increase of the mulatto population is less rapid.