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was kept on a plantation with full license as a mere breeder of human beings! And from this disastrous system, so wide has been the separation of families, and the rending of the ties of relationship, that now after twenty years of freedom, one cannot take up a copy of the eighty or ninety colored newspapers printed in the United States, without finding at times, a score of inquiries, of husbands for wives, and of wives for husbands; of children for parents, and of parents for children. Ever and anon I meet with a woman who had a dozen children sold from her; and in her old age, with living children, is childless, not knowing where they are! And one case came to my knowledge where a woman married her own son, sold from her in his early boyhood; and only discovered the relationship months after the marriage!
Of this gross carnality of the slave system, trained into the blood for generations, until they became mere animals, we see symptoms cropping out ever and anon, in the atrocious acts which are reported in southern newspapers. The slave system is indeed dead, but its deadly fruit still survives. But it should be remembered that these gross sins are common as well among the whites of the South as among its black population. It filled them full of lust as well as their victims.[1]
One would have supposed that with these appalling facts staring him in the face, Dr. Tucker would have taken up the wail of lamentation—
"We have offended. Oh, my countrymen!
We have offended very grievously,
And been most tyrannous. From East to West
A groan of accusation pierces Heaven!
The wretched plead against us; multitudes,
Countless and vehement, the sons of God
- ↑ See "A Journey to the Back Country and Sea Side and Slave States," by Frederick Law Olmstead.
