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ed. Under these circumstances the general body of planters, who were in the main adventurers of the freest type, were fain to establish connections with such of the slave-women as attracted their sympathy, through personal comeliness or aptitude in domestic affairs, or, usually, both combined. There was ordinarily in this beginning of the seventeenth century no Vashti that needed expulsion from the abode of a plantation Ahasuerus to make room for the African Esther to be admitted to the chief place within the portals. One great natural consequence of this was the extension to the relatives or guardians of the bondswoman so preferred of an amount of favour which, in the case of the more capable males, completes the parallel we have been drawing by securing for each of them the precedence and responsibilities of a Mordecai. The offspring of these natural alliances came in therefore to cement more intimately the union of interests which previous relations had generated. Beloved by their fathers, and in many cases destined by them to a lot superior [245] to that whereto they were entitled by formal law and social prescription, these young procreations--Mulattos, as they were called--were made the objects of special and careful provisions on the fathers' part. They were, according to the means of their fathers in the majority of cases, sent for education and training to European or other superior institutions. After this course they were either formally acknowledged by their fathers, or, if that was impracticable, amply and suitably provided for in a career out of their native colony. To a reflecting mind there is something that interests, not to say fascinates, in studying the action and reaction upon one another of circumstances in the existence of the Mulatto. As a matter of fact, he had much more to complain of under the slave system than his pure-blooded African relations. The law, by decreeing that every child of a freeman and a slave woman must follow the fortune of the womb, thus making him the property of his mother exclusively, practically robbed him before his very birth of the nurture and protection of a father. His reputed father had no obligation to be even aware of his procreation, and nevertheless [246] --so inscrutable are the ways of Providence!--the Mulatto was the centre around which clustered the outraged instincts of nature in rebellion against the desecrating mandates that prescribed treason to
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