words, is nothing more than a hollow pretence- which is, slight chastisement; it is not even whip. a hypocritical flourish to produce an impression ping, but 'correction.' And as if hypocrisy and favorable to their justice and magnanimity. Af malignity were on the rack to outwit each other, ter declaring that he who is 'guilty of wilfully even that weak word must be still farther diluted; and maliciously killing a slave, shall suffer the so 'moderate' is added: and, to crown the cli. same punishment as if he had killed a freeman;' max, compounded of absurdity, hypocrisy, and the act concludes thus: Provided, always, this cold-blooded murder, the legal definition of 'moact shall not extend to the person killing a slave derate correction' is covertly given; which is, outlawed by virtue of any act of Assembly of any punishment that KILLS the victim. All in. this state; or to any slave in the act of resistance flictions are either moderate or immoderate; and to his lawful overseer, or master, or to any slave the design of this law was manifestly to shield dying under their moderate correction.' Reader, the murderer from conviction, by carrying on its look at this proviso. 1. It gives free license to all face the rule for its own interpretation; thus ad. persons to kill outlawed slaves. Well, what is vertising, beforehand, courts and juries, that the an outlawed slave? A slave who runs away, fact of any infliction producing death, was no evilurks in swamps, &c., and kills a hog or any dence that it was immoderate, and that beating a other domestic animal to keep himself from starv- man to death came within the legal meaning of ing, is subject to a proclamation of outlawry; moderate correction! The design of the-legis. (Haywood's Manual, 521,) and then whoever lature of North Carolina in framing this law is finds him may shoot him, tear him in pieces with manifest; it was to produce the impression upon dogs, burn him to death over a slow fire, or kill the world, that they had so high a sense of justice him by any other tortures. 2. The proviso grants as voluntarily to grant adequate protection to the full license to a master to kill his slave, if the lives of their slaves. This is ostentatiously set slave resist him. The North Carolina Bench has forth in the preamble, and in the body of the law. decided that this law contemplates not only ac. That this was the most despicable hypocrisy, and tual resistance to punishment, &c., but also offer. that they had predetermined to grant no such proing to resist. (Stroud's Sketch, 37.) If, for ex- tection, notwithstanding the pains taken to get the ample, a slave undergoing the process of branding credit of it, is fully revealed by the proviso, which should resist by pushing aside the burning stamp; was framed in such a way as to nullify the law, or if wrought up to frenzy by the torture of the for the express accommodation of slaveholding lash, he should catch and hold it fast; or if he gentlemen murdering their slaves. All such find break loose from his master and run, refusing to in this proviso a convenient accomplice before the stop at his command; or if he refuse to be flog-fact, and a packed jury, with a ready-made verged; or struggle to keep his clothes on while his master is trying to strip him; if, in all these, or any one of the hundred other ways he resist, or offer, or threaten to resist the infliction; or, if the master attempt the violation of the slave's wife, and the husband resist his attempts without the least effort to injure hin, but merely to shield his wife from his assaults, this law does not merely permit, but it authorizes the master to murder the slave on the spot. The brutality of these two provisos brands its authors as barbarians. But the third cause of excmption could not be outdone by the legislation of fiends. DYING under MODERATE correction! MODERATE Correction and DEATH-cause and effect! 'Provided ALWAYS,' says the law, this act shall not extend to any slave dying under moderate correction! Here is a formal proclamation of impunity to murder—an express pledge of acquit. tal to all slaveholders who wish to murder their slaves, a legal absolution-an indulgence granted before the commission of the crime! Look at the phraseology. Nothing is said of maimings, dismemberments, skull fractures, of severe bruisings, or lacerations, or even of floggings; but a word is used, the common-parlance import of dict of not guilty,' both gratuitously furnished by the government! The preceding law and proviso are to be found in Haywood's Manual, 530; also in Laws of Tennessee, Act of October 23, 1791; and in Stroud's Sketch, 37. Enough has been said already to show, that though the laws of the slave states profess to grant adequate protection to the life of the slave, such professions are mere empty pretence, no such protection being in reality afforded by them. But there is still another fact, showing that all laws which profess to protect the slaves from injury by the whites are a mockery. It is this-that the testimony, neither of a slave nor of a free colored person, is legal testimony against a white. To this rule there is no exception in any of the slave states: and this, were there no other evidence, would be sufficient to stamp, as hypocritical, all the provisions of the codes which profess to protect the slaves. Professing to grant protection, while, at the same time, it strips them of the only means by which they can make that protection available! Injuries must be legally proved before they can be legally redressed: to deprive men of the power of proving their injuries, is itself the greatest of all injuries; for it not only exposes to however, that though the penalty for each of these seventy-one crimes is 'death,' yet a majority of them are, in the words of the law, 'death with though technically capital, are not so in fact. In Mississippi, slaves are punished capitally for more than thirty crimes, for which whites are punished only by fine or imprisonment, or both. Eight of these are not recognized as crimes, either by common law or by statute, when committed by whites. In South Carolina slaves are punished capitally for nine more crimes than the whitesin Georgia, for six-and in Kentucky, for seven more than whites, &c. We surely need not detain the reader by comments on this monstrous inequality with which the penal codes of slave When we all, but invites them, by a virtual guarantee of penitentiary.' (P. 107, where the reader will find impunity, and is thus the author of all injuries. all the crimes enumerated.) It should be added, It matters not what other laws exist, professing to throw safeguards round the slave-this makes them blank paper. How can a slave prove out rages perpetrated upon him by his master or over-in clergy;' and in Virginia, clergyable offences, seer, when his own testimony and that of all his fellow-slaves, his kindred, associates, and acquaintances, are ruled out of court? and when he is entirely in the power of those who injure him, and when the only care necessary, on their part, is, to see that no white witness is looking on. Ordinarily, but one white man, the overscer, is with the slaves while they are at labor; indeed, on most plantations, to commit an outrage in the presence of a white witness would be more difficult than in their absence. He who wished to commit an illegal act upon a slave, instead of be. ing obliged to take pains and watch for an oppor-states treat slaves and their masters. tunity to do it unobserved by a white, would find it difficult to do it in the presence of a white if he wished to do so. The supreme court of Louisiana, in their decision, in the case of Crawford vs. Cherry, 15, (Martin's La. Rep. 142; also "Law of Slavery," 249,) where the defendant was sued for the value of a slave whom he had shot and killed, say, "The act charged here, is one rarely committed in the presence of witnesses," (whites). So in the case of the State vs. Mann, (Devereux, N. C. Rep. 263; and "Law of Slavery," 247;) in which the defendant was charged with shooting a slave girl belonging' to the plaintiff; the Supreme Court of North Carolina, in their decision, speaking of the provocations of the master by the slave, and the consequent wrath of the master prompting him to bloody vengeance, add, 'a vengeance generally practised with impunity, by reason of its privacy.' Laws excluding the testimony of slaves and free colored persons, where a white is concerned, do not exist in all the slave states. One or two of them have no legal enactment on the subject; but, in those, 'public opinion' acts with the force of law, and the courts invariably reject it. This brings us back to the potency of that oft-quoted 'public opinion,' so ready, according to our objector, to do battle for the protection of the slave! Another proof that 'public opinion,' in the slave states, plunders, tortures, and murders the slaves, instead of protecting them, is found in the fact, that the laws of slave states inflict capital punishment on slaves for a variety of crimes, for which, if their masters commit them, the legal penalty is merely imprisonment. Judge Stroud, in his Sketch of the Laws of Slavery, says, that, by the laws of Virginia, there are seventy-one crimes for which slaves are capitally punished, though in none of these are whites punished in a manner more severe than by imprisonment in the consider that guilt is in proportion to intelligence, and that these masters have by law doomed their slaves to ignorance, and then, as they darkle and grope along their blind way, inflict penalties upon them for a variety of acts regarded as praise. worthy in whites; killing them for crimes, when whites are only fined or imprisoned-to call such a 'public opinion' inhuman, savage, murderous, diabolical, would be to use tame words, if the English vocabulary could supply others of more horrible import. But slaveholding brutality does not stop here. While punishing the slaves for crimes with vastly greater severity than it does their masters for the same crimes, and making a variety of acts crimes in law, which are right, and often duties, it persists in refusing to make known to the slaves that complicated and barbarous penal code which loads them with such fearful liabilities. The slave is left to get a knowledge of these laws as he can, and cases must be of constant occurrence at the south, in which slaves get their first knowledge of the existence of a law by suffering its penalty. Indeed, this is probably the way in which they commonly learn what the laws are; for how else can the slave get a knowledge of the laws? He cannot read he cannot learn to read; if he try to master the alphabet, so that he may spell out the words of the law, and thus avoid its penalties, the law shakes its terrors at him; while, at the same time, those who made the laws refuse to make them known to those for whom they are designed. The memory of Caligula will blacken with execration while time lasts, because he hung up his laws so high that people could not read them, and then punished them because they did not keep them. Our slaveholders aspire to blacker infamy. Caligula was content with hanging up his laws where his subjects could see them; and if they could not read them, they knew where } they were, and might get at them, if, in their zeal | the south, in the form of law, tramples on all those to learn his will, they had used the same means fundamental principles of right, justice, and equity, to get up to them that those did who hung them there. Even Caligula, wretch as he was, would have shuddered at cutting their legs off, to prevent their climbing to them; or, if they had got there, at boring their eyes out, to prevent their reading them. Our slaveholders virtually do both; for they prohibit their slaves acquiring that knowledge of letters which would enable them to read the laws; and if, by stealth, they get it in spite of them, they prohibit them books and papers, and flog them if they are caught at them. Further-Caligula merely hung his laws so high that they could not be read-our slaveholders have hung theirs so high above the slave that they cannot be seen-they are utterly out of sight, and he finds out that they are there only by the falling of the penalties on his head. Thus the "public opinion" of slave states protects the defenceless slave by arming a host of legal penal. ties and setting them in ambush at every thicket along his path, to spring upon him unawares. Stroud, in his Sketch of the Laws of Slavery, page 100, thus comments on this monstrous barbarity. "The hardened convict moves their sympathy, and is to be taught the laws before he is expected to obey them;† yet the guiltless slave is subjected to an extensive system of cruel enactments, of no part of which, probably, has he ever heard." Having already drawn so largely on the reader's patience, in illustrating southern public opinion' by the slave laws, instead of additional illustrations of the same point from another class of those laws, as was our design, we will group together a few particulars, which the reader can take in at a glance, showing that the "public opinion" of slaveholders towards their slaves, which exists at *The following extract from the Alexandria (D. C.) Gazette is an illustration. "CRIMINALS CONDEMNED. On Monday last the Court of the borough of Norfolk, Va. sat on the trial of four negro boys arraigned for burglary. The first indictment charged them with breaking into the hardware store of Mr. E. P. Tabb, upon which two of them were found guilty by the Court, and condemned to suffer the penalty of the law, which, in the case of a slave, is death. The second Friday in April is appointed for the execution of their awful sentence. Their ages do not exceed sixteen. The first, a fine active boy, belongs to a widow lady in Al exandria; the latter, a house servant, is owned by a gentleman in the borough. The value of one was fixed at $1000, and the other at $800; which sums are to be re-imbursed to their respective owners out of the state treasury." In all probability these poor boys, who are to be hung for stealing, never dreamed that death was the legal penalty of the crime. Here is another, from the "New Orleans Bee" of 14, 1837.-"The slave who STRUCK some citizens in Canal street, some weeks since, has been tried and found guilty, and is sentenced to be HUNG on the 24th. which are recognized as sacred by all civilized nations, and receive the homage even of barbarians. 1. One of these principles is, that the benefits of law to the subject should overbalance its burdens-its protection more than compensate for its restraints and exactions-and its blessings altogether outweigh its inconveniences and evilsthe former being numerous, positive, and perma. nent, the latter few, negative, and incidental. Totally the reverse of all this is true in the case of the slave. Law is to him all exaction and no protection: instead of lightening his natural burdens, it crushes him under a multitude of artificial ones; instead of a friend to succor him, it is his deadliest foe, transfixing him at every step from the cradle to the grave. Law has been beautifully defined to be "benevolence acting by rule;" to the Ame. rican slave it is malevolence torturing by system. It is an old truth, that responsibility increases with capacity; but those same laws which make the slave a "chattel," require of him more than of men. The same law which makes him a thing incapable of obligation, loads him with obligations superhuman-while sinking him below the level of a brute in dispensing its benefits, he lays upon him burdens which would break down an angel. 2. Innocence is entitled to the protection of law. Slaveholders make innocence free plunder; this is their daily employment; their laws assail it, make it their victim, inflict upon it all, and, in some respects, more than all the penalties of the greatest guilt. To other innocent persons, law is a blessing, to the slave it is a curse, only a curse and that continually. 3. Deprivation of liberty is one of the highest punishments of crime; and in proportion to its justice when inflicted on the guilty, is its injustice when inflicted on the innocent; this terrible penalty is inflicted on two million seven hundred thousand, innocent persons in the Southern states. 4. Self-preservation and self-defence, are universally regarded as the most sacred of human rights, yet the laws of slave states punish the slave with death for exercising these rights in that way, which in others is pronounced worthy of the highest praise. 5. The safe-guards of law are most needed where natural safe-guards are weakest. Every principle of justice and equity requires, that, those who are totally unprotected by birth, station, wealth, friends, influence, and popular favor, "It shall be the duty of the keeper [of the penitentiary] on the receipt of each prisoner, to read to him or her such and especially those who are the innocent objects parts of the penal laws of this state as impose penalties for of public contempt and prejudice, should be escape, and to make all the prisoners in the penitentiary acquainted with the same. It shall also be his duty, on the more vigilantly protected by law, than those who discharge of such prisoner, to read to him or her such parts are so fortified by defence, that they have far less of the said laws as impose additional punishments for the repetition of offences."-Rule 12th, for the internal govern need of legal protection; yet the poor slave who ment of the Penitentiary of Georgia. See 26 of the Peni-is fortified by none of these personal bulwarks, is tentiary Act of 1816.—Prince's Digest, 386. denied the protection of law, while the master, the legal conviction and punishment of masters surrounded by them all, is panoplied in the mail and mistresses, for illegal outrages upon their slaves, of legal protection, even to the hair of his head; is an event which has rarely, if ever, occurred yea, his very shoe-tie and coat-button are legal in the slave states; they know, also, that although protegees. hundreds of slaves have been murdered by their masters and mistresses in the slave states, within the last twenty-five years, and though the fact of their having committed those murders has been established beyond a doubt in the minds of the surrounding community, yet that the murderers have not, in a single instance, suffered the penalty of the law. 6. The grand object of law is to protect men's natural rights, but instead of protecting the natural rights of the slaves, it gives slaveholders license to wrest them from the weak by violence, protects them in holding their plunder, and kills the rightful owner if he attempt to recover it. This is the protection thrown around the rights of American slaves by the public opinion,' of slaveholders; these the restraints that hold back their masters, overseers, and drivers, from inflicting injuries upon them! Finally,since slaveholders have deliberately legalized the perpetration of the most cold-blooded atrocities upon their slaves, and do pertinaciously refuse to make these atrocities illegal, and to punish those who perpetrate them, they stand convicted before the world, upon their own testimony, of the most barbarous, brutal, and habitual inhumanity. If this be slander and falsehood, their own lips have uttered it, their own fingers have famy. In a Republican government, law is the pulse of its heart as the heart beats the pulse beats, except that it often beats weaker than the heart, never stronger or to drop the figure, laws are never worse than those who make them, very often better. If human history proves any-written it, their own acts have proclaimed it; thing, cruelty of practice will always go beyond and however it may be with their morality, they cruelty of law. have too much human nature to perjure themLaw-making is a formal, deliberate act, per-selves for the sake of publishing their own informed by persons of mature age, embodying the intelligence, wisdom, justice and humanity, of the community; performed, too, at leisure, after full opportunity had for a comprehensive survey of all the relations to be affected, after careful investigation and protracted discussion. Consequently laws must, in the main, be a true index of the permanent feelings, the settled frame of mind, cherished by the community upon those subjects, and towards those persons and classes whose condition the laws are designed to establish. If the laws are in a high degree cruel and inhuman, towards any class of persons, it proves that the feelings habitually exercised towards that class of persons, by those who make and perpetuate those laws, are at least equally cruel and inhuman. We say at least equally so; for if the habitual state of feeling towards that class be unmerciful, it must be unspeakably cruel, relentless and malignant when provoked; if its ordinary action is inhuman, its contortions and spasms must be tragedies; if the waves run high when there has been no wind, where will they not break when the tempest heaves them! Further, when cruelty is the spirit of the law towards a proscribed class, when it legalizes great outrages upon them, it connives at, and abets greater outrages, and is virtually an accomplice of all who perpetrate them. Hence, in such cases, though the degree of the outrage is illegal, the perpetrator will rarely be convicted, and, even if convicted, will be almost sure to escape punishment. This is not theory but history. Every judge and lawyer in the slave states knows, that Having dwelt at such length on the legal code of the slave states, that unerring index of the public opinion of slaveholders towards their slaves; and having shown that it does not protect the slaves from cruelty, and that even in the few instances in which the letter of the law, if executed, would afford some protection, it is virtually nullified by the connivance of courts and juries, or by popular clamor; we might safely rest the case here, assured that every honest reader would spurn the absurd falsehood, that the public opinion' of the slave states protects the slaves and restrains the master. But, as the assertion is made so often by slaveholders, and with so much confidence, notwithstanding its absurdity is fully revealed by their own legal code, we propose to show its falsehood by applying other tests. We lay it down as a truth that can be made no plainer by reasoning, that the same public opinion,' which restrains men from committing outrages, will restrain them from publishing such outrages, if they do commit them ;-in other words, if a man is restrained from certain acts through fear of losing his character, should they become known, he will not voluntarily destroy his character by making them known, should he be guilty of them. Let us look at this. It is assumed by slaveholders, that public opinion' at the south so frowns on cruelty to the slaves, that fear of disgrace would restrain from the infliction of it, were there no other consideration. Now, that this is sheer fiction is shown by the 6 cloth over her head and face, and a fly bonnet on Nash County, July 7, 1838. "I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face,”—“ I tried to make the letter M,” and this he says in a newspaper, and puts his name to it, and the editor of the paper who is, also, its proprietor, publishes it for him and pockets his fec. Perhaps the reader will say, 'Oh, it must have been published in an insignificant sheet printed in some obscure corner of the state; perhaps by a gang of squatters,' in the Dismal Swamp, universally regarded as a pest, and edit fact, that the newspapers in the slaveholding states, teem with advertisements for runaway slaves, in which the masters and mistresses describe their men and women, as having been • branded with a hot iron,' on their cheeks,' 'jaws,' breasts,' arms,' legs,' and thighs;' also as 'scarred,'' very much scarred,' 'cut up,' 'marked,' &c. with the whip,' also with iron collars on,' chains,' bars of iron,'' fetters,' 'bells,'' horr.s,' shackles,' &c. They, also, describe them as having been wounded by buckshot,' rifle-balls,' &c. fired at them by their 'owners,' and others when in pursuit; also, as having notches,' cut in their ears, the tops or bottoms of their ears cut off,' or slit,' or one ear cut off, or both ears cut off,' &c. &c. The masters and mistresses who thus advertise their runaway slaves, coolly sign their names to their advertisements, giving the street and number of their residences, if in cities, their post of fice address, &c. if in the country; thus ma-ed by some scape-gallows, who is detested by the king public proclamation as widely as possible that they brand,' 'scar,' 'gash,' cut up,' &c. the flesh of their slaves; load them with irons, cut off their ears, &c.; they speak of these things with the utmost sang froid, not seeming to think it possible, that any one will esteem them at all the less because of these outrages upon their slaves; further, these advertisements swarm in many of the largest and most widely circulated political and commercial papers that are published in the slave states. The editors of those papers constitute the main body of the literati of the slave states; they move in the highest circle of society, are among the popular' men in the community, and as a class, are more influential than any other; yet these editors publish these advertisements with iron indifference. So far from proclaiming to such felons, homicides, and murderers, that they will not be their blood-hounds, to hunt down the innocent and mutilated victims who have escaped from their torture, they freely furnish them with every facility, become their accomplices and share their spoils; and instead of outraging public opinion,' by doing it, they are the men after its own heart, its organs, its representatives, its self. To show that the 'public opinion' of the slave states, towards the slaves, is absolutely diabolical, we will insert a few, out of a multitude, of similar advertisements from a variety of southern papers now before us. The North Carolina Standard, of July 18, 1838, contains the following: “TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD. Ranaway from the subscriber, a negro woman and two children; the woman is tall and black, and a few days before she went off, I BURNT HER WITH A HOT IRON ON THE LEFT SIDE OF HER FACE; I TRIED TO MAKE THE LETTER M, and she kept a whole community. To this I reply that the "North Carolina Standard," the paper which contains it, is a large six columned weekly paper, handsomely printed and ably edited; it is the leading Democratic paper in that state, and is published at Raleigh, the Capital of the state, Thomas Loring, Esq. Editor and Proprietor. The motto in capitals under the head of the paper is, "THE CONSTITUTION AND THE UNION OF THE STATES-THEY MUST BE PRESERVED." The same Editor and Proprietor, who exhibits such brutality of feeling towards the slaves, by giving the preceding advertisement a conspicuous place in his columns, and taking his pay for it, has apparently a keen sense of the proprieties of life, where whites are concerned, and a high regard for the rights, character and feelings of those whose skin is colored like his own. As proof of this, we copy from the number of the paper containing the foregoing advertisement, the following Editorial on the pending political canvass. "We cannot refrain from expressing the hope that the Gubernatorial canvass will be conducted with a due regard to the character, and feel. didates for that office; and that the press of ings of the distinguished individuals who are canNorth Carolina will set an example in this respect, worthy of imitation and of praise." What is this but chivalrous and honorable feeling? The good name of North Carolina is dear to him on the comfort, character and feelings,' of her white citizens he sets a high value; he feels too, most deeply for the character of the Press of North Carolina, sees that it is a city set on a hill, and implores his brethren of the editorial 'set an example' of courtesy and magnanimity worthy of initation and praise. Now, reader, put all these things together and con them over, and then read again the preceding corps to |