2. Innocence is entitled to the protection of law. Slaveholders make innocence free plunder; this is their daily employment; their laws assail it, make it their victim, inflict upon it all, and, in some respects, more than all the penalties of the greatest guilt.  To other innocent persons, law is a blessing, to the slave it is a curse, only a curse and that continually.

3. Deprivation of liberty is one of the highest punishments of crime; and in proportion to its justice when inflicted on the guilty, is its injustice when inflicted on the innocent; this terrible penalty is inflicted on two million seven hundred thousand, innocent persons in the Southern states.

4. Self-preservation and self-defence, are universally regarded as the most sacred of human rights, yet the laws of slave states punish the slave with death for exercising these rights in that way, which in others is pronounced worthy of the highest praise.

5. The safeguards of law are most needed where natural safe-guards are weakest. Every principle of justice and equity requires, that, those who are totally unprotected by birth, station, wealth, friends, influence, and popular favor, and especially those who are the innocent objects of public contempt and prejudice, should be more vigilantly protected by law, than those who are so fortified by defence, that they have far less need of legal protection; yet the poor slave who is fortified by none of these personal bulwarks, is denied the protection of law, while the master, surrounded by them all, is panoplied in the mail of legal protection, even to the hair of his head; yea, his very shoe-tie and coat-button are legal protegees.

6.  The grand object of law is to protect men’s natural rights, but instead of protecting the natural rights of the slaves, it gives slaveholders license to wrest them from the weak by violence, protects them in holding their plunder, and kills the rightful owner if he attempt to recover it.

This is the protection thrown around the rights of American slaves by the ‘public opinion,’ of slaveholders; these the restraints that hold back their masters, overseers, and drivers, from inflicting injuries upon them!

In a Republican government, law is the pulse of its heart—­as the heart beats the pulse beats, except that it often beats weaker than the heart, never stronger—­or to drop the figure, laws are never worse than those who make them, very often better.  If human history proves anything, cruelty of practice will always go beyond cruelty of law.