Here is another, from the “New Orleans Bee” of ——­ 14, 1837—­“The slave who STRUCK some citizens in Canal street, some weeks since, has been tried and found guilty, and is sentenced to be HUNG on the 24th.”]

Stroud, in his Sketch of the Laws of Slavery, page 100, thus comments on this monstrous barbarity.

“The hardened convict moves their sympathy, and is to be taught the laws before he is expected to obey them;[36] yet the guiltless slave is subjected to an extensive system of cruel enactments, of no part of which, probably, has he ever heard.”

[Footnote 36:  “It shall be the duty of the keeper [of the penitentiary] on the receipt of each prisoner, to read to him or her such parts of the penal laws of this state as impose penalties for escape, and to make all the prisoners in the penitentiary acquainted with the same.  It shall also be his duty, on the discharge of such prisoner, to read to him or her such parts of the laws as impose additional punishments for the repetition of offences.”—­Rule 12th, for the internal government of the Penitentiary of Georgia.  Sec. 26 of the Penitentiary Act of 1816.—­Prince’s Digest, 386.]

Having already drawn so largely on the reader’s patience, in illustrating southern ‘public opinion’ by the slave laws, instead of additional illustrations of the same point from another class of those laws, as was our design, we will group together a few particulars, which the reader can take in at a glance, showing that the “public opinion” of slaveholders towards their slaves, which exists at the south, in the form of law, tramples on all those fundamental principles of right, justice, and equity, which are recognized as sacred by all civilized nations, and receive the homage even of barbarians.

1.  One of these principles is, that the benefits of law to the subject should overbalance its burdens—­its protection more than compensate for its restraints and exactions—­and its blessings altogether outweigh its inconveniences and evils—­the former being numerous, positive, and permanent, the latter few, negative, and incidental.  Totally the reverse of all this is true in the case of the slave.  Law is to him all exaction and no protection:  instead of lightening his natural burdens, it crushes him under a multitude of artificial ones; instead of a friend to succor him, it is his deadliest foe, transfixing him at every step from the cradle to the grave.  Law has been beautifully defined to be “benevolence acting by rule;” to the American slave it is malevolence torturing by system.  It is an old truth, that responsibility increases with capacity; but those same laws which make the slave a “chattel,” require of him more than of men.  The same law which makes him a thing incapable of obligation, loads him with obligations superhuman—­while sinking him below the level of a brute in dispensing its benefits, he lays upon him burdens which would break down an angel.