In 1861 Mary Boykin Chesnut, the wife of a leading Confederate politician, general and slave-owner, wrote in her diary:
“[W]omen are punished when their masters and mistresses are brutes and not when they do wrong—and then we live surrounded by prostitutes… Who thinks any worse of a Negro or Mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system & wrong & iniquity… like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—& every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think…
My disgust sometimes is boiling over… alas for the men! No worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be.”
In her 1861 book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, former slave Harriet Ann Jacobs wrote
“I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister… The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky… How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink.”
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