ANSWER.  It was public opinion that made him a slave.  In a republican government the people make the laws, and those laws are merely public opinion in legal forms.  We repeat it,—­public opinion made them slaves, and keeps them slaves; in other words, it sunk them from men to chattels, and now, forsooth, this same public opinion will see to it, that these chattels are treated like men!

By looking a little into this matter, and finding out how this ’public opinion’ (law) protects the slaves in some particulars, we can judge of the amount of its protection in others. 1.  It protects the slaves from robbery, by declaring that those who robbed their mothers may rob them and their children.  “All negroes, mulattoes, or mestizoes who now are, or shall hereafter be in this province, and all their offspring, are hereby declared to be, and shall remain, forever, hereafter, absolute slaves, and shall follow the condition of the mother.”—­Law of South Carolina, 2 Brevard’s Digest, 229.  Others of the slave states have similar laws.

2.  It protects their persons, by giving their master a right to flog, wound, and beat them when he pleases.  See Devereaux’s North Carolina Reports, 263.—­Case of the State vs.  Mann, 1829; in which the Supreme Court decided, that a master who shot at a female slave and wounded her, because she got loose from him when he was flogging her, and started to run from him, had violated no law, AND COULD NOT BE INDICTED. It has been decided by the highest courts of the slave states generally, that assault and battery upon a slave is not indictable as a criminal offence.

The following decision on this point was made by the Supreme Court of South Carolina in the case of the State vs.  Cheetwood, 2 Hill’s Reports, 459.

Protection of slaves.—­“The criminal offence of assault and battery cannot, at common law, be committed on the person of a slave.  For, notwithstanding for some purposes a slave is regarded in law as a person, yet generally he is a mere chattel personal, and his right of personal protection belongs to his master, who can maintain an action of trespass for the battery of his slave.

“There can be therefore no offence against the state for a mere beating of a slave, unaccompanied by any circumstances of cruelty, or an attempt to kill and murder.  The peace of the state is not thereby broken; for a slave is not generally regarded as legally capable of being within the peace of the state.  He is not a citizen, and is not in that character entitled to her protection.”