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 fountain. This benighted region, we are told by Chief-Justice Marshall in a memorable judgment,[47] still asserts a right, discarded by Christendom, to enslave captives taken in war; and this African Barbarism is the beginning of American Slavery. The Supreme Court of Georgia, a Slave State, has not shrunk from this conclusion. “Licensed to hold slave property,” says the Court, “the Georgia planter held the slave as a chattel, either directly from the slave-trader or from those who held under him, and he from the slave-captor in Africa. The property of the planter in the slave became thus the property of the original captor.”[48] It is natural that a right thus derived in defiance of Christendom, and openly founded on the most vulgar Paganism, should be exercised without mitigating influence from Christianity,--that the master’s authority over the person of his slave, over his conjugal relations, over his parental relations, over the employment of his time, over all his acquisitions, should be recognized, while no generous presumption inclines to Freedom, and the womb of the bondwoman can deliver only a slave. From its home in Africa, where it is sustained by immemorial usage, this Barbarism, thus derived and thus developed, traversed the ocean to American soil. It entered 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 slave-ship, from that early day till now,--helping to pack the 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, lash or lust, and fastening itself upon his offspring to the remotest generation. Thus are barbarous 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 barbarous pedigree, tricks them out with a phrase of the Roman Law, discarded by the Common Law, which simply renders into ancient Latin an existing rule of African Barbarism, recognized as an existing rule of American Slavery.