state of circumstances, devolve on the bondman. It seems, however, to
be assumed in the American arguments on the subject that, if we allow
Slavery to have been a primitive Family institution, the
acknowledgment is pregnant with an admission of the moral
defensibility of Negro-servitude at the present moment. What then is
meant by saying that the Slave was originally included in the Family?
Not that his situation may not have been the fruit of the coarsest
motives which can actuate man. The simple wish to use the bodily
powers of another person as a means of ministering to one's own ease
or pleasure is doubtless the foundation of Slavery, and as old as
human nature. When we speak of the Slave as anciently included in the
Family, we intend to assert nothing as to the motives of those who
brought him into it or kept him there; we merely imply that the tie
which bound him to his master was regarded as one of the same general
character with that which united every other member of the group to
its chieftain. This consequence is, in fact, carried in the general
assertion already made that the primitive ideas of mankind were
unequal to comprehending any basis of the connection _inter se_ of
individuals, apart from the relations of family. The Family consisted
primarily of those who belonged to it by consanguinity and next of
those who had been engrafted on it by adoption; but there was still a
third class of persons who were only joined to it by common subjection
to its head, and these were the Slaves. The born and the adopted
subjects of the chief were raised above the Slave by the certainty
that in the ordinary course of events they would be relieved from
bondage and entitled to exercise powers of their own; but that the
inferiority of the Slave was not such as to place him outside the pale
of the Family, or such as to degrade him to the footing of inanimate
property, is clearly proved, I think, by the many traces which remain
of his ancient capacity for inheritance in the last resort. It would,
of course, be unsafe in the highest degree to hazard conjectures how
far the lot of the Slave was mitigated, in the beginnings of society,
by having a definite place reserved to him in the empire of the
Father. It is, perhaps, more probable that the son was practically
assimilated to the Slave, than that the Slave shared any of the
tenderness which in later times was shown to the son. But it may be
asserted with some confidence of ad