Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin [pp. 214-254]

Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.
slaves, and that its sundering is much more frequent, of their
own will, than by that of their owners. Such, however, is
the case, and that they are separately sold, is only a conse quence of their own indifference to the connection. Their
obtuseness on the subject has somewhat caused that of their
masters. The negro, in fact, is proverbially a Lothario. He
is seldom faithful to his vows. He loves to rove. For this
reason he takes his wife, wherever this is possible, on another
plantation than that to which he belongs. He does not relish
that his wife's eyes shall be too frequently upon him. This
year, your man Toby has a wife at Jones's plantation. To
your surprise, next Christmas, you find that he now seeks
connubial felicity at Jenkins's. A third year, he shifts to
Johnson's, and by the fourth year, you find him in the negro
quarter of Jackson's. Thus, sailor like, he boxes the com pass. In every sea a port, in every port a home. Owners
have frequently endeavoured to check this roving propensity,
but in vain. With a strict, but unreasoning sense of chris tiant duty, they have compelled their negroes, when about to
choose their wives, to go before the priest and make solemn
vows: but the experience of a little space, soon satisfies
them that they have done mischief-that they have increased
the responsibilities of Sambo, without increasing his own
sense of them. The divorce, a mensa et thoro, does not wait
upon that a vinculo mnatrimonii; and shows the happy couple
to have reached, by equally short processes, the blessed privileges which Fourierism teaches in the Northern States, and
that scorn of the marriage ceremony which is now taught
openly by so many thousand philanthropists of both sexes
in New-England. Compare the number of divorces effected
by the operation of slavery in the South, with such as are
effected by what are called Fourier doctrines in the Northern
States, and by cicisbeism in Italy; and the moral accounts of
slavery are in no danger. Comnpare the degree of outrage
done to the sensibilities in the two cases, and those of the
negro will be always imperceptible. These runaways from
slavery are most usually as glad to escape from the wife as
from the owner;-flying not, perhaps, because either is found
too severe, but from a mere restless desire for change, and to
1853.1
251