The engineered gender divide of the black family according to Du Bois (The Negro American Family)

In Lowndes county, Ala., in 1892, a description of a Negro country wedding tells of the chasing of the bride after the ceremony in a manner very similar to the Zulu ceremony described - on a previous page. Careful research would doubtless reveal many other traces of the African family in America. They would, however, be traces only, for the effectiveness of the slave system meant the practically complete crushing out of the African clan and family life. No more complete method of reducing a barbarous people to subjection can be devised. The Indian could not be reduced to slavery because, being in his own home, he could not be permanently and effectively separated from his clan, and the clan fought for his freedom. Only in the isolated islands, then, was Indian slavery successful, and died out there for want of a slave trade. The essential features of Negro slavery in America was:

1. No legal marriage.

2. No legal family.

3. No legal control over children.

This is not inconsistent with much teaching of the morals of modern family life to slaves; the point is that the recognition of the black family from 1619 to 1863 was purely a matter of individual judgment or caprice on the part of the master. Public opinion and custom counted for much , and the law tended to recognize some quasi family rights forbidding , for instance , in some cases the separation of mothers and very young infants - yet on the whole it is fair to say that while to some extent European family morals were taught the small select body of house servants and artisans , both by precept and example , the great body of field hands were raped of their own sex customs and provided with no binding new ones . Slavery gave the monogamic family ideal to slaves, but it compelled and desired only the most imperfect practice of its most ordinary morals. A few quotations will illustrate these conclusions:

A slave cannot even contract matrimony, the association which takes place among slaves and is called marriage being properly designated by the word contubernium, a relation which has no sanctity and to which no civil rights are attached. ¹ A slave has never maintained an action against the violator of his bed. A slave is not admonished for incontinence, or punished for fornication or adultery; never prosecuted for bigamy, or petty treason, for killing a husband being a slave, any more than admitted to an appeal for murder? Slaves were not entitled to the conditions of matrimony, and therefore they had no relief in cases of adultery; nor were they the proper objects of cognation or affinity, but of quasi - cognation only.

A necessary consequence of slavery is the absence of the marriage relation. No slave can commit bigamy, because the law knows no more of the marriage of slaves than of the marriage of brutes. A slave may, indeed, be formally married, but so far as legal rights and obligations are concerned it is an idle ceremony. Of course, these laws do not recognize the paternal relation as belonging to slaves. A slave has no more legal authority over his child than a cow has over her calf.4 In the slave - holding States, except in Louisiana, no law exists to prevent the violent separation of parents from their children, or even from each other.5 Slaves may be sold and transferred from one to another without any statutory restriction, as to the separation of parents and children, & c., except in the State of Louisiana. Slaves cannot marry without the consent of their masters, and then marriages do not produce any of the civil effects which result from such contract.7 (De Bois, 1909)