and cases must be of constant occurrence at the south, in which slaves get their first knowledge of the existence of a law by suffering its penalty.  Indeed, this is probably the way in which they commonly learn what the laws are; for how else can the slave get a knowledge of the laws?  He cannot read—­he cannot learn to read; if he try to master the alphabet, so that he may spell out the words of the law, and thus avoid its penalties, the law shakes its terrors at him; while, at the same time, those who made the laws refuse to make them known to those for whom they are designed.  The memory of Caligula will blacken with execration while time lasts, because be hung up his laws so high that people could not read them, and then punished them because they did not keep them.  Our slaveholders aspire to blacker infamy.  Caligula was content with hanging up his laws where his subjects could see them; and if they could not read them, they knew where they were, and might get at them, if, in their zeal to learn his will, they had used the same means to get up to them that those did who hung them there.  Even Caligula, wretch as he was, would have shuddered at cutting their legs off, to prevent their climbing to them; or, if they had got there, at boring their eyes out, to prevent their reading them.  Our slaveholders virtually do both; for they prohibit their slaves acquiring that knowledge of letters which would enable them to read the laws; and if, by stealth, they get it in spite of them, they prohibit them books and papers, and flog them if they are caught at them.  Further—­Caligula merely hung his laws so high that they could not be read—­our slaveholders have hung theirs so high above the slave that they cannot be seen—­they are utterly out of sight, and he finds out that they are there only by the falling of the penalties on his head.[35] Thus the “public opinion” of slave states protects the defenceless slave by arming a host of legal penalties and setting them in ambush at every thicket along his path, to spring upon him unawares.

[Footnote 35:  The following extract from the Alexandria (D.C.) Gazette is all illustration.  “CRIMINALS CONDEMNED.—­On Monday last the Court of the borough of Norfolk, Va. sat on the trial of four negro boys arraigned for burglary.  The first indictment charged them with breaking into the hardware store of Mr. E.P.  Tabb, upon which two of them were found guilty by the Court, and condemned to suffer the penalty of the law, which, in the case of a slave, is death.  The second Friday in April is appointed for the execution of their awful sentence. Their ages do not exceed sixteen.  The first, a fine active boy, belongs to a widow lady in Alexandria; the latter, a house servant, is owned by a gentleman in the borough.  The value of one was fixed at $1000, and the other at $800; which sums are to be re-imbursed to their respective owners out of the state treasury.”  In all probability these poor boys, who are to be hung for stealing, never dreamed that death was the legal penalty of the crime.