Towanda daily review. [volume] (Towanda, Pa.) 1879-1921, 1879-12-17
A Relic of Slavery.

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in servitude two colord girls, the children
of a woman he claimed to be the owner
of in ante-bellum days. He was idicted
in the United States Circuit Court, under
the act of Congress which makes it
penal offense to carry away any person
with intent to sell him into slavery or
to hold him as slave, but it was decided
that since the abolition of slavery this
act cannot be enforced. The STAKEHOLDER
consequently escaped the penalty. 1t
seems that if the persons engaged in this
prosecution, instead of seeking to punish
the STAKEHOLDER under the provisions Of
an obsolete statute, had sued out writ
of habeas corpus, the two girls would
have been set at liberty by much simpler
process.
This Tennessee Bourbon, who has for
validity of the Thirteenth amendment to
the Constitution, is not the only slave
holder in the South. AT the close of the
war Il large number of the late slave
had the small children of their former
slaves bound to them under the provisions
of the State laws. This was especially
the case i'm the border states, where in
many counties the Judges of the courts
were only too willing to assist in perpetu-
ating the ''pecular institution" Such
of these children as have not arrived at
twenty-one years Of age, are held in in
voluntary servitude. AS late as 1870
Judge Bond SCI children free in the lower
counties of Maryland, who had been
bound to their former masters without
their own consent or that of theirparents.
In the Corolinas and in the Gulf States
the ex-Slaveholders cling to the old Gus
toms with great tenacity. Their system
of domestic discipline does not differ
from that which obtained on the planta-
tions in the "good old days" They still
look upon the lash as the most eflicacious
and cheapest instrument of punishment.
and wherever it can be used without
subjecting those who WELD it to prose-
cuton for assault it is constantly applied
for OfenSes great and small. When the
seeded States attempted to reconstruct
themselves during the first two years of
President JohnsOn's administration, the
State Legislatures took special care to
perpetuate the lash, the whipping-pOst
and the compulsory servitude of minor
colOred children. The South Carolina
Legislature in the somewhat celebrated
"Act to regulate the domestic relations"
prescribed the number of lashes that
should be given for particular offences
and also named the hours at which the
colored people should go to bed and get
up in the morning.
A great deal of opprobrium has
been heapel upon the so-cal,ed Gear
pet-bag rule" in the South but in point
of fact, if it had not been for the men of
Northern birth who assisted in framing
the new Constitutions of the seeded
States, after President Johnson's plan of
reconstruction had been overthrown. a
system of involuntary apprenticeship
would have taken the place of the institu-
tion which the Emancipation Proclama-
tion and the Thirteenth amendment to
the Constitution forever abolished. The
Tennessee farmer who refused to recog-
nize the validity of these great public acts
is fair representative of the men who
would have made the Constitutions and
laws of the Southern States if Congress
had not assisted in the work of recon-