Now, then, for the facts. These facts are, that marriage in its substance was as much recognized among our servants as among any other peasantry; that the union was uniformly instituted upon a formal written license of the two masters; that it was almost always sanctioned by a religious ceremonial conducted by a minister; that the regularity of the connexion was uniformly recognized by the master's assigning the husband and wife their own dwelling; that the moral opinion of both whites and blacks made precisely the same distinction between this connexion and the illicit ones, and between the fruits of it as legitimate, and the fruits of concubinage as illegitimate, which publick opinion establishes for white persons: and that even the criminal law recognized it as a regular connexion, by extending to the black man who slew the violator of his bed in heat of blood, the same forbearance which it extends to the outraged husband. How can it be said, in the face of these facts, that marriage did not exist among them? But, it is asked, did not the master possess power to separate this union at his will; and was not this power often exercised? They did. The power, relatively, was not often exercised; and when the separation was not justified by the crimes of the parties, it met the steady and increasing reprobation of publick opinion. The instances of tyrannical separation were, at most, far fewer than the harsh tyranny of destitution imposes on poor whites in all other countries; and the pretended philanthropy of the Yankees has, in five years, torn asunder more families than all the slave dealers of the South did in a hundred. But the power of separating was sometimes abused by masters; and the room for this abuse was just the defect in our laws, which nearly all Southern Christians deplored, and which they desired to repair. Justice requires the testimony, on the other hand, that the relaxed morals which prevailed among the Africans was not the result of their marital relations, as arranged among us, but the heritage of their paganism; that under our system the evil was decreasing; and that since their emancipation and nominal subjection to the marriage law of the whites, a flood of licentiousness, vagrant concubinage, and infanticide, has broken out again among them. Clear proof this, that our abused system was better adapted to their character than the present.