ABSTRACT
The regime of slavery in old South facilitated concubinage not merely by making black women subject to white men's wills but by promoting intimacy and weakening racial antipathy. Town slaves in a sense rubbed elbows with every one, high and low, competed with free labor, white and black, and took tone more or less from all and sundry. Slave marriages, not being legal contracts, might be dissolved without recourse to public tribunals. The legislature of Barbados, when urged by the governor in 1681 to promote the Christianization of slaves on that island, replied, "Their savage brutishness renders them wholly incapable. The slave plantation, like other schools, was conditioned by the nature and habituations of its teachers and pupils. An intelligent master would consult his own interest by affording every talented slave special instruction and by inculcating into the commoner sort as much routine efficiency, regularity and responsibility as they would accept.
