Footnote J: In the new slave States, there are a great many negroes,
who can speak no other language than some of the numerous African
dialects.]

A provincial law of Maryland enacted that any white woman who married
a negro slave should serve his master during her husband's lifetime,
and that all their children should be slaves. This law was not
repealed until the end of eighteen years, and it then continued in
full force with regard to those who had contracted such marriages in the
intermediate time; therefore the descendants of white women so situated
may be slaves unto the present day. The doctrine of the common law is
that the offspring shall follow the condition of the _father_; but slave
law (with the above temporary exception) reverses the common law, and
provides that children shall follow the condition of the _mother_.
Hence mulattoes and their descendants are held in perpetual bondage,
though the _father_ is a free white man. "Any person whose _maternal_
ancestor, even in the _remotest_ degree of distance, can be shown to
have been a negro, Indian, mulatto, or a mestizo, _not_ free at the time
this law was introduced, although the _paternal_ ancestor at each
successive generation may have been a _white free_ man, is declared to
be the subject of perpetual slavery." Even the code of Jamaica, is on
this head, more liberal than ours; by an express law, slavery ceases at
the _fourth_ degree of distance from a negro ancestor: and in the other
British West Indies, the established custom is such, that quadroons or
mestizoes (as they call the second and third degrees) are rarely seen in
a state of slavery. Here, neither law nor public opinion favors the
mulatto descendants of free white men. This furnishes a convenient game
to the slaveholder--it enables him to fill his purse by means of his own
vices;--the right to sell one half of his children provides a fortune
for the remainder.--Had the maxim of the common law been allowed,--i. e.
that the offspring follows the condition of the _father_,--the
mulattoes, almost without exception, would have been free, and thus the
prodigious and alarming increase of our slave population might have been
prevented. The great augmentation of the servile class in the Southern
States, compared with the West India colonies, has been thought to
indicate a much milder form of slavery; but there are other causes,
which tend to produce the result. There are much fewer white men in the
Brit