— 19
his parental relations
— over his conjugal — over the employment of
all his acquisitions,
should be recognized, while
authority over the person of his slave
— over time — over
lations
his
no generous presumption
inclines to
re-
Freedom, and the
womb
bond-woman can deliver only a slave. From its home in Africa, where it is sustained by immemo-
of the
and thus developed, 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 helping to pack the slave-ship from that early day till now 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 barbarial usage,
this Barbarism, thus derived
traversed the ocean to
American
soil.
It entered
—
rous prerogatives of barbarous half-naked African chiefs perpetuated in American Slave-masters, while the Senator from Virginia, [Mr. Mason,] perhaps unconscious of their origin
perhaps desirous to secure for them the appearance of a less 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 barbarous pedigree
—
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, Eoman 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 As there is a higher law above, so there is a political power. lower law below, and each is felt in human affairs. Thus far we have seen Slavery only in its pretended law,
