the various States, after the turmoil of war had ceased, to provide
and enact:

I. That all those who had sustained to each other the relation of
husband and wife in the days of slavery, might, upon application
to an officer named in each county, be registered as such husband
and wife.

2. That all who did not so register within a certain time should
be liable to indictment, if the relation continued thereafter.

3. That the effect of such registration should be to constitute such
parties husband and wife, as of the date of their first assumption
of marital relations.

4. That for every such couple registered the officer should be
entitled to receive the sum of one half-dollar from the parties
registered.

There was a grim humor about this marriage of a race by wholesale,
millions at a time, and _nunc pro tunc;_ but especially quaint
was the idea of requiring each freed-man, who had just been torn,
as it were naked, from the master's arms, to pay a snug fee for
the simple privilege of entering upon that relation which the law
had rigorously withheld from him until that moment. It was a strange
remedy for a long-hidden and stubbornly denied disease, and many
strange scenes were enacted in accordance with the provisions of
this statute. Many an aged couple, whose children had been lost in
the obscure abysses of slavery, or had gone before them into the
spirit land, old and feeble and gray-haired, wrought with patience