35

HISTORICAL ANNOTATION 663

Douglass means more than two strong and attractive slaves whose progeny
would increase the owner's wealth. Although slaves could be permitted to "marry" by
their masters, the American slave code did not recognize such unions as contractual
or legal. Rather, they were merely "moral" arrangements. Some masters promoted
slave marriage because such arrangements conformed to their own religious beliefs
and because they felt it might render their slaves easier to discipline. On large plantations,
slaveholders saw slave marriage and family life as a way to promote contentment
among bondsmen in order to discourage escape. "Abroad" marriages--those
between slaves owned by different masters--were more likely to engender some
dissatisfaction. The most compelling reason for slaveholders to promote marriage,
however, was economic; to increase their population of slaves. By law, the offspring
of the Lloyd slave Ned Roberts and Aaron Anthony's Hester Bailey would have
belonged to the latter master. Also a marriage of these two slaves would not have
shared the negative features of most abroad marriages, because of the geographical
proximity of the Anthony and Lloyd households. Douglass's comment therefore
seems to allude to more sinister motives for Anthony's desire to keep the couple apart.
These motives may be seen in Douglass's description of Hester's torture at her master's
hands. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century
America (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), 1-19; Blassingame, Slave Community, 77-104;
Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 11-43; E. Franklin Frazier, "The Negro Slave
Family," JNH, 15:198-259 (April 1930).
39.32-35 The fear. . .their owners] Their legal status as chattel or real estate
placed slaves, male and female alike, wholly at the mercy of their masters. While
several slave women's narratives confirm instances of rape by owners, owners' sons,
and overseers, it is unclear how often such exploitation occurred. Although rape of
slave women was assumed by abolitionists to be the common practice of slaveholders,
available evidence of the distribution of persons considered mulattoes among
freemen and slaves in the antebellum South does not necessarily support that assumption.
Conversely, the enforced submission of female slaves and high rates of miscarriage
and infant mortality in the slave population may suggest hidden evidence of a
more widespread practice. Goodell, American Slave Code, 105-21; Elizabeth Fox-
Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and While Women of the Old
South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 146-242, 325-29; Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and
Steven F. Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their
Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom (New York, 1998), 146-48; Fogel and
Engerman, Time on the Cross 126-38; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 11-43;
Wilbert E. Moore, "Slave Law and the Social Structure," JNH, 26:171-202 (April
1941).
39.35-36 Slavery provided. . .the race] Because most American slave codes
defined slaves as either personal property or real estate of slaveholders, a slave could
not be party to a contract. Therefore, slaves were unable to enter into a legal marriage.
Nonetheless, some masters recognized quasi-marriage--contubernium, the factual