"Certainly, we have, sir; there are plenty of brutes at the North; but our law, you must remember, does not compel women to submit themselves to their power. A wife, cruelly treated, can escape from her husband, and can compel him to give her subsistence, and to cease from doing her harm. A woman could defend herself against her husband's cruelty, and the law would sustain her."
"It would not be safe to receive negroes' testimony against white people; they would be always plotting against their masters, if you did."
"Wives are not always plotting against their husbands."
"Husband and wife is a very different thing from master and slave."
"Your remark, that a bad man might whip his wife, suggested an analogy, sir."
"If the law was to forbid whipping altogether, the authority of the master would be at an end."
"And if you allow bad men to own slaves, and allow them to whip them, and deny the slave the privilege of resisting cruelty, do you not show that you think it is necessary to permit cruelty, in order to sustain the authority of masters, in general, over their slaves? That is, you establish cruelty as a necessity of Slavery—do you not?"
"No more than of marriage, because men may whip their wives cruelly."
"Excuse me, sir; the law does all it can, to prevent such cruelty between husband and wife; between master and slave it does not, because it cannot, without weakening the necessary authority of the master—that is, without destroying Slavery. It is, therefore, a fair argument against Slavery, to show how cruelly this necessity, of sustaining the authority of cruel and passionate men over their slaves, sometimes operates."
He asked what it was Uncle Tom "tried to make out."
