others, called in the papers free men, were sent to the workhouse: and the rest, on paying costs and fines amounting to one hunded and eleven dollars, were set at liberty.[1]
It is not wonderful that a gross and delirious superstition should fail to produce the effect of pure Christianity on the morals of the negroes. Mr. Olmsted gives us strong evidence of their licentiousness; and notably of the licentiousness of those among them who are members of Churches and make professions of religion.[2] But indeed the legal sanctity of marriage is so essential a safeguard of morality in Christian countries, that we should expect sinister consequences to flow from its withdrawal. In the South the marriage of a slave is, before the law and in the eyes of his master, as the cohabitation of beasts. The State thus preaches disregard of morality to the negro, and the master enforces the preaching of the State by practices from which it was part of the mission of Christianity to purge the world.[3]
Let the Masters and the Slaves in America become
- ↑ Olmsted, Journeys and Explorations, vol. i., p. 36. If we are told, by way of apology for the intellectual and religious condition of the negro slave, that the intellectual and religious condition of the English peasant and his religious relations to the upper classes are unsatisfactory, the answer is that they are acknowledged to be unsatisfactory, and that since the revival of a religious spirit in the nation a good deal has been done to amend them, as a multitude of schools and a number of new churches with free sittings evince.
- ↑ Journey in the Back Country, p. 113.
- ↑ Olmsted, Journeys and Explorations, vol. ii., p. 229. When the Abolitionists are charged with producing the Slave-owner’s cruelty by their alarming denunciations, they may reasonably ask whether they are also to be charged with producing his lust.
