272 MORAL CONDITION OF NEGROES. [CHAP. XIX. 



quencies and frailties, not only of parents, but of ancestors for 

 three or four generations back, what unexpected disclosures should 

 we not witness ! 



There are scarcely any instances of mulattoes born of a black 

 father and a white mother. The colored women who become the 

 mistresses of the white men are neither rendered miserable nor 

 degraded, as are the white women who are seduced in Europe, 

 and who are usually abandoned in the end, and left to be the 

 victims of want and disease. In the northern states of America 

 there is so little profligacy of this kind, that their philanthro 

 pists may perhaps be usefully occupied in considering how the 

 mischief may be alleviated south of the Potomac ; but in Great 

 Britain there is so much need of reform at home, that the whole 

 thoughts and energies of the rich ought to be concentrated in such 

 schemes of improvement as may enable us to set an example of 

 a higher moral standard to the slave-owning aristocracy of the 

 Union. 



On one of the estates in this part of Georgia, there is a mulatto 

 mother who has nine children by a full black, and the difference 

 of shade between them and herself is scarcely perceptible. If the 

 white blood usually predominates in this way in the second gen 

 eration, as I am told is the case, amalgamation would proceed 

 very rapidly, if marriages between the races were once legal 

 ized ; for we see in England that black men can persuade very 

 respectable white women to marry them, when all idea of the 

 illegality and degradation of such unions is foreign to their 

 thoughts. 



Among the obstacles which the Christian missionaries encount 

 er here when they teach the virtue of chastity, I must not omit 

 to mention the loose code of morality which the Africans have in 

 herited from their parents. My wife made the acquaintance of 

 a lady in Alabama, who had brought up with great care a col 

 ored girl, who grew up modest and well-behaved, till at length 

 she became the mother of a mulatto child. The mistress re 

 proached her very severely for her misconduct, and the girl at 

 first took the rebuke much to heart ; but having gone home one 

 day to vi?it her mother, a native African, she returned, saying, 



