he law of God, practically determines whether husbands
shall dwell with their wives: and an amount of anguish, which God alone
can compute, testifies that slavery has thus determined, times without
number, that husbands shall not dwell with their wives. A distinguished
gentleman, who has been much at the South, is spending a little time in
my family. He told me but this day, that he had frequently known the air
filled with shrieks of anguish for a whole mile around the spot, where,
under the hammer of the auctioneer, the members of a family were
undergoing an endless separation from each other. It was but last week,
that a poor fugitive reached a family, in which God's commands, "Hide
the outcasts, betray not him that wandereth"--"Hide not thyself from thy
own flesh"--are not a dead letter. The heaviest burden of his heart is,
that he has not seen his wife for five years, and does not expect to see
her again: his master, in Virginia, having sold him to a Georgian, and
his wife to an inhabitant of the District of Columbia. Whilst the law of
God requires wives to "submit themselves to their husbands, as it is fit
in the Lord;" the law of slavery commands them, under the most terrific
penalties, to submit to every conceivable form of violence, and the most
loathsome pollution, "as it is fit" in the eyes of slaveholders--no
small proportion of whom are, as a most natural fruit of slavery,
abandoned to brutality and lust. The laws of South Carolina and Georgia
make it an offence punishable with death, "if any slave shall presume to
strike a white person." By the laws of Maryland and Kentucky, it is
enacted "if any negro, mulatto, or Indian, bond or free, shall, at any
time, lift his or her hand in opposition to any person, not being a
negro or Indian, he or she shall, in the first-mentioned State, suffer
the penalty of cropped ears; and, in the other, thirty-nine lashes on
his or her bare back, well laid on, by order of the justice." In
Louisiana there is a law--for the enactment of which, slavery is, of
course, responsible--in these words: "Free people of color ought never
to insult or strike white people, nor presume to conceive themselves
equal to the whites: but, on the contrary, they ought _to yield to them
on every occasion_, and never speak or answer them but with respect,
under the penalty of imprisonment, according to the nature of the
offence." The following extract of a letter, written to me from the
South, by a gen