ed, by law, to deliver to his slaves* one barrel of indian corn, or the equivalent thereof in rice, beans, or other grain, and a pint of salt, every month. In North Carolina, by a law passed in 1753 and still in force, it is provided that "in case any slave, who shall appear not to have been sufficiently clothed, and to have constantly received, for the preceding year, an allowance not less than a quart of corn per day, shall be convicted of stealing any corn, cattle, &c, from any person not the owner of such slave; such injured person may maintain an action of trespass against the owner or possessor of such slave, and recover his or her damages." Whether the slave, in such case, shall be punished as a thief by the operation of law, or left to be punished, at the discretion of the master for the expense and vexation occasioned by the suit does not appear. In Louisiana, some attempt appears, to secure to the slaves, by legal enactment, a supply of clothing.-How adequate this supply is, if the practice is strictly conformable to the prescriptions of law, will be easily seen, when we perceive that the legal allowance is "one linen shirt and pantaloons (une chemise et une culotte de toile) for the summer, and a linen shirt and woollen great coat and pantaloons for the winter." In South Carolina and Georgia some enactments appear, ostensibly designed to restrain or punish such owners of slaves as may be guilty of withholding from them the needful supplies of clothing and food; but a slight attention to the laws themselves and the circumstances of the par * Meaning, I suppose, to each of his slaves, though I do not find that it is so expressed. ties concerned, will be sufficient to convince us, that no practical advantage to the slaves, can possibly result from them. If we imagine that the laws above noticed, were enacted, as laws are generally supposed to be, to correct existing or probable evils, what can we think of that one which limits the hours of legal labour to fifteen in twentyfour; whilst in several of the states, of which Virginia and Georgia are a part, convicted felons, who are sentenced to hard labour as a punishment, are never allowed to be kept at work more than ten hours in the day? Is the protection afforded to the slave, less humane than the punishment adjudged to the criminal? In Jamaica, the slaves are stated by B. Edwards, to be usually employed out of crop time, about ten hours in the day, though I find by the consolidated slave law, they may be kept at work twelve and a half. I am far from asserting that slaves in the United States, are generally overwrought or too scantily fed; though unquestionably very oppressive cases of both sometimes occur. This is not the great they escape this species of injustice, and crying evil of slavery. But when they are more indebted to the humanity or negligence of their owners, than to the efficacy of law. Unfortunately, almost every legal provision, designed to protect the slaves from the tyranny of cruel and unprincipled owners, and against such the laws ought most carefully to provide, are rendered nugatory by the influence of other provisions or principles by which the codes of the slaveholding districts are marked. Independently of the aversion almost universally felt, to any interference with the private concerns of others, and the antipathies, not to say personal danger, resulting from such'interference, to which the case of injustice to slaves, is by no means an exception, the legal impediments to a successful prosecution of any suits directed to this object, are such as to render it quite improbable that the experiment, except in very flagrant cases, will often be tried. The injuries to be redressed are probably often unknown, except to the oppressor and the party aggrieved: and a stern, inflexible principle of modern slaveholding law, is that no slave, or other person of colour, can be admitted as a competent witness against a white The master's authority is little less arbitrary, in relation to the degree and kind of punishment to which the slave shall be subjected, than to the labour exacted; and this power of arbitrary punishment, is exercised not only by the master himself, whose interest, in the life and health of the slave, might assign some limits to the wantonness of power, but by a numerous class of agents and sub-agents, whose inter * If this delegation of absolute power is not peculiar to negro slavery, it was at least unknown to English law till introduced, with other innovations, into the system of West Indian servi ests are more dependent on the quantum of labour obtained, than on the preservation of the slave. In the laborious employment of cultivating the sugar-cane in the British colonies, the slaves usually work in gangs, moving like a military corps, in a line, and followed by drivers armed with whips, which are often applied with tremendous effect, to those who, from sluggishness or inability, fall behind the rest. Of all the shapes and hues which slavery has ever assumed, the driving system of the British sugar islands appears pre-eminently odious. The miserable victims are subject not only to the imperious authority of their European lords, but to the capricious cruelty of drivers, selected from the most athletic of the slaves, who are, in general, little schooled in the science of humanity, and impelled, by the fear of being punished themselves, to exact from their human herd, the quantum of labour required. To contemplate a group of human beings, with passions, faculties, and infirmities, like our own, toiling, amid the fervours of a tropical sun, under the impetus of a drivers whip applied with little restraint or discretion, may well awaken in the benevolent mind, a train of sensations which language is too barren to express. What man seeing this, And having human feelings, does not blush And hang his head to think himself a man? In some instances, it is true, the number of lashes to be inflicted at one tude. The English villein, might prosecute any man but his lord, for beating him without just cause, and it was no legal defence, in such action, to plead that it was done by the command of his lord.-Coke's.Reports. time, or for one offence, is professedly limited by law. ca in 1760:-An overseer, remarkable for his tenderness and humanity to the slaves, was permitted to pass unmolested through a band of insurgents, many of them newly imported, who carried massacre and desolation in their course, and barbarously murdered every other white person that fell under their power! As it is no part of my plan to harrow up the feelings of my readers with the shocking details of cruelty abounding in the narratives of those who have visited the sugar plantations of the British islands, I shall just observe that they mostly concur in the statement, that few of the slaves are exempt from the permanent scars left by the whip, and that in many of them, those parts of the body, to which the whip is usually applied, are completely covered with the vestiges of cruel and repeated punishments. Ample as the range of the master's legal authority, in relation to punishments, Such limitation, however, if it could be strictly enforced, would evidently afford to the suffering victim, a very slender protection against the cruelty of an irritated master, or his more unfeeling deputy, when the legal number of lashes on the naked body, with a long cattle whip, frequently extends to thirty-nine, for a single offence; and this liable to repetition at short intervals, at discretion. But the means of securing even this slender protection are wanting, for, as the evidence of slaves, or even of free coloured people, is there, as well as in the slaveholding sections of the United States, always excluded when white persons are under trial, violations of the laws, however enormous, where slaves alone are the sufferers, can seldom be legally proved, so as to subject the white criminals to the trivial and inadequate punishment which the laws have pre-obviously is, the limits prescribed by scribed. That the punishment, to which the slaves in the British islands are subjected, is not only occasionally but habituually severe, appears from the concurrent testimony of numberless witnesses of unquestionable veracity. Even Bryan Edwards, the champion of West Indian humanity, admits that instances of excessive cruelty sometimes occur, though he asserts that the general treatment is mild, temperate, and indulgent; and that instances of cruelty, when susceptible of legal proof, are severely punished.* A striking comment on the general mildness, with which the slaves are treated, is furnished by the same historian in his account of an insurrection which occurred in Jamai *Hist. W. Ind. vol. 2, ch. 5. law are very frequently disregarded. R. Bickell, a clergyman late of Kingston, in a work recently published, mentions an instance which fell under his own inspection, of a black driver, punishing a slave, for a trivial neglect, beyond the limits prescribed even to a white man's authority, and yet the officer legally entrusted with the protection of the slaves, though likewise a witness to the transaction, permitted it to pass without animadversion. A large portion of the West Indian proprietors reside in Europe, and entrust the management of their slaves, to agents and overseers, who are more interested in the production of large immediate returns, than in the preservation of the slaves, or the permanent advantage of their absent employers. These overseers are very generally but little influenced by moral or religious considerations; and hence their pas sions are allowed a range, of which the poor dependent slaves are often made the victims. Even those who retain a good share of the milk of human kindness, must, from the influence of habit, and the frequent sight or knowledge of negro punishments, become less sensitive to the sufferings of this despised and degraded class. The mind, accustomed to sights of wo, becomes gradually indurated, until treatment may be viewed as humane and indulgent, which would once have been contemplated with horror; especially when the sufferers are considered as a distinct and inferior race. In most of the British Islands, the murder of a slave has by recent laws been declared a capital crime. In Barbadoes, however, their latest enactment on that subject is so cautiously expressed, as to furnish ground for doubt whether the murder of a slave there, can, even at this time, be visited with any greater punishment than a pecuniary fine. "If any person shall hereafter wilfully, maliciously, wantonly, and without provocation, kill and murder any slave, such person so killing and murdering, being duly convicted thereof, by the evidence of one or more white person or persons, shall suffer death." There are so many ways in which a slave may provoke, either by neglect or commission, his even in very atrocious cases, only by a small fine, and imprisonment of a very limited duration. In Barbadoes, it is questionable whether the mutilation of a slave by his owner would be punishable at all, or if inflicted on the slave of another, on any other ground than a civil suit for an injury done to property. In the United States the all comprehending doctrine that the slave is the property of his master, joined to the general exclusion of negro testimony from our legal tribunals, must necessarily place the fate of the slave, almost entirely, within the power of his owner. The authority to punish, at discretion, the offences of the slave, seems naturally to result from the right of ownership; and any restriction on the exercise of that authority, may therefore be deemed a virtual denial or limitation of that all-absorbing right. At present, the wilful, malicious, and deliberate murder of a slave is declared a capital crime in every state of the Union. In some of them, however, this general provision is strangely modified. A law of North Carolina passed in 1798, enacts, "that if any person shall hereafter be guilty of wilfully and maliciously killing a slave, such offender shall be adjudged guilty of murder, and suffer the same punishment as if he had killed a freeman. Provided always this act shall not extend to the person killing a slave out master or overseer, that few convic-lawed by virtue of any act of assembly tions, under this law, can be reasonably expected, even if the kgal proof could be obtained; particularly as the jury, whose feelings are most likely to sympathize with the slaveholder than with the slave, must be judges of the provocation as well as the murder. The mutilation of a slave is punishable, of this state, or to any slave in the act of resistance to his lawful owner or master, or to any slave dying under moderate correction." A similar law and proviso exist in Lousiana. The constitution of Georgia contains a provision nearly similar, "Any person who shall maliciously dismember or deprive a slave of life, shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted in case the like offence had been committed on a free white person, except in case of insurrection of such slave, and unless such death should happen by accident in giving such slave moderate correction. Whatever credit we may accord to the humanity of the inhabitants of those states, it is difficult to resist the conclusion, that if slaves are never subjected to that most terrible of deaths, "dissection of the knotted scourge," they owe their exemption to some other cause than the protection of law. As a proclamation of outlawry against a slave is authorized, "whenever he runs away from his master, conceals himself in some obscure retreat, and, to sustain life, kills a hog or some animal of the cattle kind," and it has been judicially determined, that it is justifiable to kill a slave, resisting, or offering to resist his master by force, it is evident that the protection afforded by law to the life of a slave, is of a very slender or questionable character. If the law should be administered in the spirit which could suggest the belief that moderate correction could. cause the death of a slave, the poor slave must look for protection, against the cruelty of his master, to some other quarter than the arm of the commonwealth. In South Carolina the wilful murder of a slave, was, by a law of 1740, made punishable by a fine of seven hundred pounds, (3000 dollars,) and incapacity to hold any office within the colony: but the killing of a slave "on a sudden heat or passion, or by undue correction," was punishable with a fine of three hundred and fifty pounds. The former part of this law VOL. I.-10. was repealed in 1821, and the punishment of death prescribed as a substitute for the pecuniary fine; but the same law reduced the penalty in the latter case, to five hundred dollars, with an authorized imprisonment not exceeding six months. In the same state the barbarous mutilation of a slave, or the infliction of cruel punishment, other than by whipping or beating with a horse whip, cowskin, switch or small stick, or by putting irons on or confining or imprisoning such slave is prohibited under a penalty of one hundred pounds ($4284.) Where such punishments are specifically admitted, what where the cruel ties which the law was intended to re dress? In the new civil code of Louisiana, the general principle is enacted, "that the slave is entirely subject to the will of his master, who may correct and chastise him, though not with unusual rigour, nor so as to mutilate or maim him, or expose him to the danger of loss of life. If the usual rigour of this humane provision, is to be estimated by the law of South Carolina, above noticed, a law, by the way, which was in force in Louisiana at the time this code was adopted, surely the slave must be in a miserable situation to need the protection of such a law. In the constitution of Mississippi, power is given to the general assembly to enact laws to oblige the owners of slaves to treat them with humanityto abstain from all injuries to them extending to life and limb, or in case of neglect or refusal to comply with the direction of such laws, to have such slave or slaves sold for the benefit of the owners. Some essay has been made to carry into effect the design of the convention; but the laws hither |