"The consequent mingling up of husbands and wives, children and youths, banishes the privacy and modesty essential to domestic peace and purity, and opens wide the door to dishonesty, oppression, violence, and profligacy. The owner may see, or hear, or know little of it. His servants may appear cheerful, and go on in the usual way, and enjoy health, and do his will, yet their actual moral state may be miserable. * * * If family relations are not preserved and protected, we cannot look for any considerable degree of moral and religious improvement."
It must be acknowledged of slavery, as a system, not only
in Liberty county, but as that system finds the expression of
the theory on which it is based in the laws of every Southern
State, that family relations are not preserved and protected
under it. As we should therefore expect, the missionary
finds that
"One of the chief causes of the immorality of negroes arises from the
indifference both of themselves and of their owners to family relations."
Large planters generally do not allow their negroes to
marry off the plantation to which they belong, conceiving
"that their own convenience and interest, and," says the
missionary, "the comfort and real happiness of their people"
are thereby promoted. Upon this point, however, it is but
just to quote the views of the editor of the Southern Agriculturist,
who, in urging planters to adopt and strictly maintain
such a regulation, says: "If a master has a servant,
and no suitable one of the other sex for a companion, he
had better give an extra price for such an one as his would
be willing to marry, than to have one man owning the
husband, and the other the wife."
But this mode of arranging the difficulty seems not to have occurred to the Liberty county missionary; and while arguing against the course usually pursued, he puts the following, as a pertinent suggestion:—
"Admitting that they are people having their preferences as well as
others, and there be a supply, can that love which is the foundation and
essence of the marriage state be forced?"
