Laws excluding the testimony of slaves and free colored persons, where a white is concerned, do not exist in all the slave states.  One or two of them have no legal enactment on the subject; but, in those, ’public opinion’ acts with the force of law, and the courts invariably reject it.  This brings us back to the potency of that oft-quoted ‘public opinion,’ so ready, according to our objector, to do battle for the protection of the slave!

Another proof that ‘public opinion,’ in the slave states, plunders, tortures, and murders the slaves, instead of protecting them, is found in the fact, that the laws of slave states inflict capital punishment on slaves for a variety of crimes, for which, if their masters commit them, the legal penalty is merely imprisonment.  Judge Stroud in his Sketch of the Laws of Slavery, says, that by the laws of Virginia, there are ’seventy-one crimes for which slaves are capitally punished though in none of these are whites punished in manner more severe than by imprisonment in the penitentiary.’ (P. 107, where the reader will find all the crimes enumerated.) It should be added, however, that though the penalty for each of these seventy-one crimes is ‘death,’ yet a majority of them are, in the words of the law, ‘death within clergy;’ and in Virginia, clergyable offences, though technically capital, are not so in fact.  In Mississippi, slaves are punished capitally for more than thirty crimes, for which whites are punished only by fine or imprisonment, or both.  Eight of these are not recognized as crimes, either by common law or by statute, when committed by whites.  In South Carolina slaves are punished capitally for nine more crimes than the whites—­in Georgia, for six—­and in Kentucky, for seven more than whites, &c.  We surely need not detain the reader by comments on this monstrous inequality with which the penal codes of slave states treat slaves and their masters.  When we consider that guilt is in proportion to intelligence, and that these masters have by law doomed their slaves to ignorance, and then, as they darkle and grope along their blind way, inflict penalties upon them for a variety of acts regarded as praise worthy in whites; killing them for crimes, when whites are only fined or imprisoned—­to call such a ‘public opinion’ inhuman, savage, murderous, diabolical, would be to use tame words, if the English vocabulary could supply others of more horrible import.

But slaveholding brutality does not stop here.  While punishing the slaves for crimes with vastly greater severity than it does their masters for the same crimes, and making a variety of acts crimes in law, which are right, and often duties, it persists in refusing to make known to the slaves that complicated and barbarous penal code which loads them with such fearful liabilities.  The slave is left to get a knowledge of these laws as he can,