Accordingly, the grand jury, under the instructions of the District Attorney, found seventy-four indictments against each of us prisoners, based on this act, one for each of the slaves found on board the vessel, two excepted, who were runaways from Virginia, and the names of their masters not known.  As it would have been possible to have fined us about, fifteen thousand dollars apiece upon these indictments, besides costs, and as, by the laws of the District, there is no method of discharging prisoners from jail who are unable to pay a fine, except by an executive pardon, one would have thought that this might have satisfied.  But the idea that we should escape with a fine, though we might be kept in prison for life from inability to pay it, was very unsatisfactory.  It was desired to make us out guilty of a penitentiary offence at the least; and for that purpose recourse was had to an old, forgotten act of Maryland, passed in the year 1737, the fourth section of which provided “That any person or persons who, after the said tenth day of September [1737], shall steal any ship, sloop, or other vessel whatsoever, out of any place within the body of any county within this province, of seventeen feet or upwards by the keel, and shall carry the same ten miles or upwards from the place whence it shall be stolen, or who shall steal any negro or other slave, or who shall counsel, hire, aid, abet, or command any person or persons to commit the said offences, or who shall be accessories to the said offences, and shall be thereof legally convicted as aforesaid, or outlawed, or who shall obstinately or of malice stand mute, or peremptorily challenge above twenty, shall suffer death as a felon, or felons, and be excluded the benefit of the clergy.”

They would have been delighted, no doubt, to hang us under this act; but that they could not do, as Congress, by an act passed in 1831, having changed the punishment of death, inflicted by the old Maryland statutes (except in certain cases specially provided for), into confinement in the penitentiary for not less than twenty years.

To make sure of us at all events, not less than forty-one separate indictments (that being the number of the pretended owners) were found against each of us for stealing slaves.

Our counsel afterwards made some complaint of this great number of indictments, when two against each of us, including all the separate charges in different counts, would have answered as well.  It was even suggested that the fact that a fee of ten dollars was chargeable upon each indictment toward the five-thousand-dollar salary of the District Attorney might have something to do with this large number.  But the District Attorney denied very strenuously being influenced by any such motive, maintaining, in the face of authorities produced against him, that this great number was necessary.  He thought it safest, I suppose, instead of a single jury on each charge against each of us, to have the chance of a much greater number, and the advantage, besides, of repeated opportunities of correcting such blunders, mistakes and neglects, as the prisoner’s counsel might point out.