18
were not derived from any of those countries which recognized the Roman law, while this law, even before the discovery of this continent, had lost all living efficacy. It is not derived from the Mohammedan law for under the mild injunctions of the Koran, a benignant servitude, unlike yours, has prevailed where the lash is not allowed to lacerate the back of a female where no knife or branding-iron is employed upon any
—
human
being, to
where the master
mark him is
as the property of his fellow-man
expressly enjoined to listen to the desires
and where the blood of the masmingling with his bond- woman, takes from her the transferable character of a chattel, and confers complete freedom upon their offspring. It is not derived from the Spanish law, for this law contains humane elements unknown to your sysof his slave for emancipation
ter,
Mohammedan Moors who so and besides, our Thirteen Colonies had no umbilical connection with Spain. Nor is it derived from English statutes or American statutes; for we have the positive and repeated averment of the Senator from Virginia, [Mr. Mason,] and also of other Senators, that in not a single State of the Union can any such statutes establishing Slavery be found. From none of these does it come. No, sir not from any land of civilization is this Barbarism derived. It comes from Africa, ancient nurse of monsters from Guinea, Dahomey, and Congo. There is its origin and fountThis benighted region, we are told by Chief- Justice Marain. shall in a memorable judgment, {The Antelope, 10 Wheaton R. tem, borrowed, perhaps, from the
long occupied Spain
66,) still asserts a right, discarded
by Christendom,
to enslave
war and this African Barbarism is the beginning of American Slavery. And the Supreme Court of
captives taken in
Georgia, a Slave State, has not shrunk from this conclusion. " Licensed to hold slave property," says the Court, u the Georgia either directly from the from those who held under him, and he from
planter held the slave as a chattel; slave-trader, or
the slave-captor in Africa.
The property of the
planter in the
slave became, thus, the property of the original captor."
(Neal
Farmer, 9 Georgia Reports, p. 555.) It is natural that a right, thus derived in defiance of Christendom, and openly founded on the most vulgar Paganism, should be exercised without
V.
.
any mitigating influence from Christianity
that the master's
