Slavery and Marriage

Les, in many ways what you're describing is simply the more traditional concept of slavery that existed in Europe prior to the advent of modern Capitalism, around the time of the Christian Reformation. There were slaves, serfs and free men, and considerable social transfer and mobility between the three. Slaves weren't, traditionally, considered to be subhuman, but, rather, simply people who had been unlucky enough to come under the power of others, by law, war or custom. In traditional societies, a slave could marry a free man, simply by the free man buying the slave's freedom. However, the traditional slave system had died out with modern Capitalism, largely because of its profound inefficiency. Simply put, free men work harder than slaves, because it's in their interests to work harder than slaves. This point is emphatically and repeatedly stated in that Bible of Capitalism, Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations". The modern incarnation of slavery in the "Old South" was, actually, something of an aberration produced specifically by the invention of the Cotton Gin. The Cotton Gin allowed for machine processing of raw cotton, highly efficiently. However, Cotton still had to be picked by hand. The Cotton Gin artificially shifted the traditional Capitalist playing field for this one product, Cotton, specifically. For Cotton alone, Slave labor was profitable, because the inefficiencies of slave labor were compensated for by the extreme efficiency of the Cotton Gin in processing raw cotton. Even with slave labor, the Cotton Gin made cotton cloth very cheap to produce. Thus, the dehumanization of the Negro Slave was a highly artificial product of circumstances relating to the economics of producing Cotton. I suspect, if marriage between blacks and whites had been tolerated in the "Old South", it would have been very difficult to maintain this fictional dehumanization. And, without it, I suspect it would have been impossible to justify slavery. Some sort of system for free labor picking cotton for profit would have been devised, as the British did in India, for example. And, consequently, there would have been no American Civil War. So, the simple institution of marriage -- effectively a contract between partners determining many aspects of the distribution of wealth and power -- can profoundly affect human history.