Page:The Barbarism of Slavery.djvu/25

 authority over the person of his slave — over his conjugal relations — over his parental relations — over the employment of his time — over all his acquisitions, should be recognized, while no generous presumption inclines to Freedom, and the womb of the bond-woman can deliver only a slave.

From its home in Africa, where it is sustained by immemorial usage, this Barbarism, thus derived and thus developed, traversed the ocean to American soil. It entered on board that fatal slave-ship “built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark," which in 1620 landed its cruel cargo at Jamestown, in Virginia, and it has boldly taken its place in every succeeding slave-ship from that early day till now — helping to pack the human freight, regardless of human agony; surviving the torments of the middle passage; surviving its countless victims plunged beneath the waves; and it has left the slave-ship only to travel inseparable from the slave in his various doom, sanctioning by its barbarous code every outrage, whether of mayhem or robbery, of lash or lust, and fastening itself upon his offspring to the remotest generation. Thus are the barbarous prerogatives of barbarous half-naked African chiefs perpetuated in American Slave-masters, while the Senator from Virginia, [,] perhaps unconscious of their origin — perhaps desirous to secure for them the appearance of a less barbarous pedigree — tricks them out with a phrase of the Roman law, discarded by the common law, partus sequitur ventrem, which simply renders into ancient Latin an existing rule of African Barbarism, recognized as an existing rule of American Slavery.,

Such is the plain juridical origin of the American slave code, which is now vaunted as a badge of Civilization. But all law, whatever may be its juridical origin, whether English or Mohammedan, Roman or African, may be traced to other and ampler influences in nature, sometimes of Right, and sometimes of Wrong. Surely the law which blasted the slave-trade as piracy punishable with death had a different inspiration from that other law, which secured immunity for the slave-trade throughout an immense territory, and invested its supporters with political power. As there is a higher law above, so there is a lower law below, and each is felt in human affairs.

Thus far we have seen Slavery only in its pretended law,