certain acts, and prohibiting others—­maiming, branding, chaining together, separating families, floggings for learning the alphabet, for reading the Bible, for worshiping God according to conscience—­the legislature has power to specify each of these acts—­declare that it is not “humane treatment,” and PROHIBIT it.—­The legislature may also believe that driving men and women into the field, and forcing them to work without pay, is not “humane treatment,” and being constitutionally bound “to oblige” masters to practise “humane treatment”—­they have the power to prohibit such treatment, and are bound to do it.

The law of Louisiana makes slaves real estate, prohibiting the holder, if he be also a land holder, to separate them from the soil.[A] If it has power to prohibit the sale without the soil, it can prohibit the sale with it; and if it can prohibit the sale as property, it can prohibit the holding as property.  Similar laws exist in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies.  The law of Louisiana requires the master to give his slaves a certain amount of food and clothing.  If it can oblige the master to give the slave one thing, it can oblige him to give him another:  if food and clothing, then wages, liberty, his own body.  By the laws of Connecticut, slaves may receive and hold property, and prosecute suits in their own name as plaintiffs:  [This last was also the law of Virginia in 1795.  See Tucker’s “Dissertation on Slavery,” p. 73.] There were also laws making marriage contracts legal, in certain contingencies, and punishing infringements of them, ["Reeve’s Law of Baron and Femme,” p. 340-1.]

[Footnote A:  Virginia made slaves real estate by a law passed in 1705. (Beverly’s Hist. of Va., p. 98.) I do not find the precise time when this law was repealed, probably when Virginia became the chief slave breeder for the cotton-growing and sugar-planting country, and made young men and women “from fifteen to twenty-five” the main staple production of the State.]

Each of the laws enumerated above, does, in principle, abolish slavery; and all of them together abolish it in fact.  True, not as a whole, and at a stroke, nor all in one place; but in its parts, by piecemeal, at divers times and places; thus showing that the abolition of slavery is within the boundary of legislation.

In the “Washington (D.C.) City Laws,” page 138, is “AN ACT to prevent horses from being cruelly beaten or abused.”  Similar laws have been passed by corporations in many of the slave states, and throughout the civilized world, such acts are punishable either as violations of common law or of legislative enactments.  If a legislature can pass laws “to prevent horses from being cruelly abused,” it can pass laws to prevent men from being cruelly abused, and if it can prevent cruel abuse, it can define what it is.  It can declare that to make men work without pay is cruel abuse, and can PROHIBIT it.