I have little or no personal
knowledge to offer; but some things, I think, I may treat as reasonably
sure, from my own observation, and from the concurrent testimony of
books, and of persons of all classes with whom I have conversed.

The rule respecting religion is so far observed as this, that infants
are baptized, and all receive Christian burial. But there is no
enforcement of the obligation to give the slaves religious instruction,
or to allow them to attend public religious service. Most of those in
the rural districts see no church and no priest, from baptism to burial.
If they do receive religious instruction, or have religious services
provided for them, it is the free gift of the master.

Marriage by the Church is seldom celebrated. As in the Roman Church
marriage is a sacrament and indissoluble, it entails great inconvenience
upon the master, as regards sales or mortgages, and is a restraint on
the Negroes themselves, to which it is not always easy to reconcile
them. Consequently, marriages are usually performed by the master only,
and of course, carry with them no legal rights or duties. Even this
imperfect and dissoluble connection has been but little attended to.
While the slave-trade was allowed, the planters supplied their stock
with bozales (native Africans) and paid little attention, even on
economic principles, to the improvement, or, speaking after the fashion
of cattle-farms, to the increase of stock on the plantation. Now that
importation is more difficult, and labor is in demand, their attention
is more turned to their own stock, and they are beginning to learn, in
the physiology of increase, that canon which the Everlasting has fixed
against promiscuous intercourse.

The laws respecting valuation, the purchase of freedom at once or by
instalments, and the compulsory transfer, I know to be in active
operation in the towns, and on plantations affording easy access to
towns or magistrates. I heard frequent complaints from slave-holders and
those who sympathized with them, as to the operation of these
provisions. A lady in Havana had a slave who was an excellent cook; and
she had been offered $1700 for him, and refused it. He applied for
valuation for the purpose of transfer, and was valued at $1000 as a
laborer, which, with the $100 for his trade, made a loss to the owner of
$600, and, as no slave can be subsequently sold for a larger sum than
his valuation, this provision gave the slave a capita