ring and the victims of it. On a
very moderate calculation, nineteen-twentieths of the present adult
colored race are illegitimate. Concubinage was practised among the
highest classes. Young merchants and others who were unmarried, on first
going to the island, regularly engaged colored females to live with them
as housekeepers and mistresses, and it was not unusual for a man to have
more than one. The children of these connections usually sat with the
mothers at the father's table, though when the gentlemen had company,
neither mothers nor children made their appearance. To such conduct no
disgrace was attached, nor was any shame felt by either party. We were
assured that there are in Bridgetown, colored ladies of
"respectability," who, though never married, have large families of
children whose different surnames indicate their difference of
parentage, but who probably do not know their fathers by any other
token. These remarks apply to the towns. The morals of the estates were
still more deplorable. The managers and overseers, commonly unmarried,
left no female virtue unattempted. Rewards sometimes, but oftener the
whip, or the dungeon, gave them the mastery in point of fact, which the
laws allowed in theory. To the slaves marriage was scarcely known. They
followed the example of the master, and were ready to minister to his
lust. The mass of mulatto population grew paler as it multiplied, and
catching the refinement along with the tint of civilization, waged a war
upon marriage which had well nigh expelled it from the island. Such was
Barbadoes under the auspices of slavery.

Although these evils still exist, yet, since the abolition of slavery,
there is one symptom of returning purity, the _sense of shame_.
Concubinage is becoming disreputable. The colored females are growing in
self-respect, and are beginning to seek regular connections with colored
men. They begin to feel (to use the language of one of them) that the
_light is come_, and that they can no longer have the apology of
ignorance to plead for their sin. It is the prevailing impression among
whites, colored, and blacks, that open licentiousness cannot long
survive slavery.

_Prejudice_ was another of the concomitants of slavery. Barbadoes was
proverbial for it. As far as was practicable, the colored people were
excluded from all business connections; though merchants were compelled
to make clerks of them for want of better, that is, _whiter_, ones.
Co