The letter of the law on the statute book is one thing, the practice of the community under that law often a totally different thing.  Each of the slave states has laws providing that the life of no white man shall be taken without his having first been indicted by a grand jury, allowed an impartial trial by a petit jury, with the right of counsel, cross-examination of witnesses, &c.; but who does not know that if ARTHUR TAPPAN were pointed out in the streets of New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah, Charleston, Natchez, or St. Louis, he would be torn in pieces by the citizens with one accord, and that if any one should attempt to bring his murderers to punishment, he would be torn in pieces also.  The editors of southern newspapers openly vaunt, that every abolitionist who sets foot in their soil, shall, if he be discovered, be hung at once, without judge or jury.  What mockery to quote the letter of the law in those states, to show that abolitionists would have secured to them the legal protection of an impartial trial!

Before the objector can make out his case, that the life of the slave is protected by the law, he must not only show that the words of the law grant him such protection, but that such a state of public sentiment exists as will carry out the provisions of the law in their true spirit.  Any thing short of this will be set down as mere prating by every man of common sense.  It has been already abundantly shown in the preceding pages, that the public sentiment of the slaveholding states toward the slaves is diabolical.  Now, if there were laws in those states, the words of which granted to the life of the slave the same protection granted to that of the master, what would they avail?  ACTS constitute protection; and is that public sentiment which makes the slave ‘property,’ and perpetrates hourly robbery and batteries upon him, so penetrated with a sense of the sacredness of his right to life, that it will protect it at all hazards, and drag to the gallows his OWNER, if he take the life of his own property?  If it be asked, why the penalty for killing a slave is not a mere fine then, if his life is not really regarded as sacred by public sentiment—­we answer, that formerly in most, if not in all the slave states, the murder of a slave was punished by a mere fine.  This was the case in South Carolina till a few years since.  Yes, as late as 1821, in the state of South Carolina, which boasts of its chivalry and honor, at least as loudly as any state in the Union, a slaveholder might butcher his slave in the most deliberate manner—­with the most barbarous and protracted torments, and yet not be subjected to a single hour’s imprisonment—­pay his fine, stride out of the court and kill another—­pay his fine again and butcher another, and so long as he paid to the state, cash down, its own assessment of damages, without putting it to the trouble of prosecuting for it, he might strut ’a gentleman.’—­See 2 Brevard’s Digest, 241.