slaves remaining twelve months in the State, are kindly restored to their former condition.  In Maryland a free negro who marries a white woman, thereby acquires all the privileges of a slave—­and generally, throughout the slave region, including the District of Columbia, every negro not known to be free, is mercifully considered as a slave, and if his master cannot be ascertained, he is thrown into a dungeon, and there kept, till by a public sale a master can be provided for him.  But often the law grants to colored men, known to be free, all the advantages of slavery.  Thus, in Georgia, every free colored man coming into the State, and unable to pay a fine of one hundred dollars, becomes a slave for life; in Florida, insolvent debtors, if black, are SOLD for the benefit of their creditors; and in the District of Columbia a free colored man, thrown into jail on suspicion of being a slave and proving his freedom, is required by law to be sold as a slave, if too poor to pay his jail fees.  Let it not be supposed that these laws are all obsolete and inoperative.  They catch many a northern negro, who, in pursuit of his own business, or on being decoyed by others ventures to enter the slave region; and who, of course, helps to augment the wealth of our southern brethren.  On the 6th of March, 1839, a report by a Committee was made to the House of Representatives of the Massachusetts Legislature, in which are given the names of seventeen free colored men who had been enslaved at the south.  It also states an instance in which twenty-five colored citizens, belonging to Massachusetts, were confined at one time in a southern jail, and another instance in which 75 free colored persons from different free States were confined, all preparatory to their sale as slaves according to law.

The facts disclosed in this report induced the Massachusetts Legislature to pass a resolution protesting against the kidnapping laws of the slave States, “as invading the sacred rights of citizens of this commonwealth, as contrary to the Constitution of the United States, and in utter derogation of that great principle of the common law which presumes every person to be innocent until proved to be guilty;” and ordered the protest to be forwarded to the Governors of the several States.

But it is not at the south alone that freemen may be converted into slaves “according to law.”  The Act of Congress respecting the recovery of fugitive slaves, affords most extraordinary facilities for this process, through official corruption and individual perjury.  By this Act, the claimant is permitted to select a justice of the peace, before whom he may bring or send his alleged slave, and even to prove his property by affidavit.  Indeed, in almost every State in the Union, a slaveholder may recover at law a human being as his beast of burden with far less ceremony than he could his pig from the possession of his neighbor.  In only three States is a man, claimed as a slave, entitled to a trial by jury.  At the last session of the New York Legislature a bill allowing a jury trial in such cases was passed by the lower House, but rejected by a democratic vote in the Senate, democracy in that State, being avowedly only skin deep, all its principles of liberty, equality, and human rights depending on complexion.