Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/47

Rh wife, neither law nor custom gives protection to the slave. Their connection may at any moment be dissolved by the master's command, the parties be torn asunder, separated for ever, husband and wife, child and mother ; the infant may be taken from its mother's breast, and sold away out of her sight and power. The wife torn from her husband's arms, forced to the lust of another, for the slave is no person, but a thing. For the chastity of the female there is no defence; no more than for the chastity of sheep and swine. Many are ravished in tender years. So is the last insult, and outrage the most debasing, added to this race of Americans. By the laws of Louisiana, all children born of slaves are reckoned as "natural and illegitimate." Marriage is "prostitution;" sacred and permanent neither in the eyes of the churches nor the law. The female slave is wholly in her master's power. Mulattoes are more valuable than blacks. So in the slave States lust now leagues with cupidity, and now acts with singleness of aim. The South is full of mulattoes; its "best blood flows in the veins of the slaves"—masters owning children white as themselves. Girls, the children of mulattoes, are sold at great price, as food for private licentiousness, or public furniture in houses of ill-fame. Under the worst of the Roman emperors this outrage was forbidden, and the Prefect of the city gave such slaves their freedom. But republican parents not rarely sell their own children for that abuse. After the formal and legal abolition of the African slave trade, it became more profitable to breed slaves for sale in the northern slave-holding States. Their labour was of comparatively little value to the declining agriculture of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. From planting they have become, to a great degree, slave breeding States. The reputed sons of the "Cavaliers" have found a new calling, and the "chivalry of the Old Dominion" betakes itself, not to manufactures, commerce, or agriculture,—but to the breeding of slaves for the southern market. Kentucky and Tennessee have embarked largely in the same adventure. It would be curious to ascertain the exact annual amount of money brought into those States from the sale of their children, but the facts are not officially laid before the public, and a random conjecture, or even a shrewd estimate, is not now to the purpose.